On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 14:32 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Adam Williamson (awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx) said:
> > We don't do anything like this at present. There are all sorts of
> > packages which are useful only to some specific piece of hardware which
> > we do not install by default. Off the top of my head I can think of
> > synce (for manipulating Windows Mobile phones), barry (for Blackberries)
>
> The right answer for these is a single syncing framework that DTRT
> whether it's a WinMo, Andriod, BlackBerry, iPhone, or whatever; not
> random phone-specific packages.
Exactly - I think it would be wise to focus our quite limited resources
to the cases where there is a mature driver framework available. This
includes kernel drivers, X.org drivers, libgphoto2, sane and a couple of
other things. And for this, we should just install everything by
default.
Sure, ideally we'd support as much hardware out of the box as possible
but if it involves installing multiple apps that overlap in
functionality.. then the solution is NOT to install each app depending
on what the user plugs in or have already plugged in... clearly the
solution is to invest in fixing this miserable situation by creating a
driver (kernel- or user-mode) framework and porting the driver code to
this framework. And then installing the best app for this by default
including all the driver software.
For the record, this is quickly becoming less and less of a problem.
Most modern hardware (except things like video drivers) is driven by
either a class protocol (such as usb-storage, PTP etc) or handled via
online services (e.g. your phone syncs with a server on the Internet).
There's a bunch of other reasons why "install XYZ when detecting ABC" is
a really bad idea (useless prompts asking "ABC was detected but you need
XYZ to drive it" or "to install XYZ enter the ROOT password"). Again, I
urge you to examine a non-OEM version of Windows.
David
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