On Tue, 2010-05-18 at 15:43 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: > On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 10:34:22AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote: > > > Of course it shouldn't be zero. This is what I was saying yesterday. Now > > if Fedora is really targeting end users who are non-technical (can we > > decide this finally, sometime, please?) then this is valid. But if it's > > true that we favor experienced computing users, it should not be zero. > > The logic here is unclear. Technical users are surely the ones most able > to deal with this situation? I'll point out here that Windows gives no > visible prompt to obtain bootup options and the world doesn't seem to > have ended I always enjoy the 'it's okay, everyone, we only have to be as good as Windows!' argument. =) Indeed the world hasn't ended, but certainly a lot of us get called halfway across town on weekends to 'fix the computer' in this sort of case. >From a later post of yours: "If you're unable to get to grub at all without setting a timeout then that's something that needs fixing, but we're better off exploring *why* your machine is behaving differently rather than bandaiding over it with a timeout and prompt." We can only take this Fedora principle so far. There are many bits of code in the kernel which work around broken ACPI / BIOS behaviour (as you well know, sorry for the egg-sucking lesson). If we were being really annoying literalists we (well, rather 'kernel developers' than 'we', but many of them are Fedora / RH people) would never do this; we'd close all the bugs with a note to the reporter to go and get their motherboard manufacturer to fix it. Being sensible people, we recognize there really *is* a limit to the 'we shouldn't work around brokenness' argument, and it comes when the brokenness is in the hands of such capricious souls as hardware manufacturers. The systems where holding down a key during boot doesn't bring up grub are badly designed systems, this is perfectly true. But still, the sensible path is to make reasonable accommodations for this sort of thing. Let's face it, if we're waiting on Sony or HP to fix this, we'll be waiting a while. Another +1 for Bill's suggestion, that seems like a nice elegant way of trying to catch the broken cases. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
