Keith Packard writes ("Bug#877024: modemmanager should ask before messing with serial ports"): > That requires fixing the package instead of just getting it out of the > way, a significantly harder thing to manage.
This has gone far enough. I would like to remind you of Constitution 6.3(5) | The Technical Committee does not engage in design of new proposals | and policies. Such design work should be carried out by individuals | privately or together and discussed in ordinary technical policy | and design forums. | | The Technical Committee restricts itself to choosing from or | adopting compromises between solutions and decisions which have | been proposed and reasonably thoroughly discussed elsewhere. Note the point about forums. If you want to engage in "design of new proposals", for example your suggestion to drop modemmanager from default installs, you should do that on the relevant mailing lists for modemmanager, or network-manager (which normally pulls it in), or debian-devel. It is not appropriate to use the TC list to advocate a novel and radical proposal in this way. I can see that a naive reading of this dispute is "Ian hates desktoppy stuff and that's why he hates modemmanagaer and that's why he hates this modemmanager behaviour". But it is not accurate. The functionality in modemmanager is important to lots of people. The fact that I'm not using modemmanager right now is more to do with the exact vagaries of hardware support than anything else. All I am saying is that modemmanager must not, even if it seems convenient, take these IMO unacceptable risks with people's serial ports. That is, the safety, security and software reliability of the users with "stuff" connected to their serial ports should take precedence over the convenience of the users who need modemmanager. And this is true even if they are the same people: someone who has "stuff" connected to their serial ports, and also needs modemmanager, should find that Debian has prioritised not putting them at risk and not breaking their stuff, over making their telephony experience more convenient. Since the maintainers and upstream evidently disagree with this tradeoff, it has been necessary for me to ask the TC to step in. I would like the TC to, overruling the maintainers: * Confirm the principle that modemmanager (and indeed other software in Debian) should not probe serial devices unless: - the user has given explicit permission; or - the device is known, for whatever reason, to definitely be a modem (or whatever kind of thing the program wants) * Say that, in the absence of a better solution, my patch should be applied to modemmanager. * Explicitly say that the TC expects the decision to be implemented in a way that the maintainers approve of, if possible, so long as that doesn't involve a large amount of additional work. Thanks, Ian.