Hello, On Nov 16 08:53 Alesh Slovak wrote (shortened): > ... distro policy ... udev rules ... ... > We can't use a static rules file because each distro > uses slightly different syntax. ... > ... changes distros themselves keep making to their udev rules ... ... > ... breakage nearly every time ...
As far as I understand udev (and HAL and how all this stuff is called nowadays) it seems you are wrong when you think it is the distros which introduce all this never ending mess of incompatible changes. Compare what I wrote about "we all urgently need a ... reliable working standard regarding device management." at https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/lsb-discuss/2009-February/005821.html As far as I understand it, it is the design of udev and HAL which is broken to the core which is the root cause because it exposes intentionally unstable kernel internal structures so that the content of HAL and udev files depend on intentionally unstable kernel internal structures. See for example the therefore required madness in /etc/udev/rules.d/55-libsane.rules ------------------------------------------------------- # Kernel >= 2.6.22 jumps here ... # Kernel < 2.6.22 jumps here ... ------------------------------------------------------- What the heck has udev libsane.rules to do with a particular kernel minor version number? An intersting evil side effect of this broken design is that the bare syntax of HAL and udev files does not change but what changes is the values (e.g. how which particular kernel internal event is currently called). Therefore the maintainers of HAL and udev cannot notice when there are incompatible changes because it is only the kernel maintainers who would know about such changes but the kernel maintainers will of course not inform the SANE or IScan or HPLIP maintainers because those are correctly out of scope for kernel maintainers. In the following URLs the issue is about HAL but as far as I understand it, it is the same for udev. Have a look at https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=438867#c48 and https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=438867#c55 or as a short summary https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=438867#c51 If you like see a list of incompatible changes in HAL which only hit me in the past see https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=438867#c44 and for openSUSE 11.2 it is of course agian broken because of one more backward-incompatible change: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=542473#c14 Currently the only feasible way out of the mess for a normal user (i.e. one who is not a udev/HAL expert) is to run the saned plus the net meta-backend on localhost to simply access his scanner via saned which runs as root. Kind Regards Johannes Meixner -- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstrasse 5, 90409 Nuernberg, Germany AG Nuernberg, HRB 16746, GF: Markus Rex