[PATCH] remove usage of g_assert() in blockdev

[David Zeuthen]

Doug Goldstein wrote:
> It does not remove the fact that everyone will be required to have PAM
> and use PAM.

I may not have been clear about this in the past (mostly because no-one 
ever done what we're doing before) but PolicyKit support is optional and 
it will continue to be optional.

Pretty soon we're going to add ConsoleKit support too, that's going to 
be optional too. Mostly because of the old saying "you never know how 
people are going to use your software", partly because some (sometimes 
extremely vocal) developers / distributions / systems / devices won't 
need it / want it.

> Which is not something everyone wants. The whole point is
> about choice. What you're essentially proposing is Microsoft here. It's
> shiny Vista. Why not make HAL display a boot splash which totally
> obscures the console.

(My $0.02: playing the Microsoft card, like you do here, makes lots of 
people automatically shake their head and not even considering replying 
to you. Personally I think it's extremely silly when people play the 
Microsoft card.)

>> Either way, having / and /usr on separate file systems doesn't really
>> make sense in this millennium I think. As such, moving HAL out of /usr
>> does not make any sense to me. I think we simply just want to advise
>> distributors that / and /usr needs to be on the same file system. 
> 
> It makes plenty of sense to lots of people and it shows your utter lack
> of experience with any real world Linux & UNIX systems. This is one of
> the most dumbfounding statements you've made on this list and is causing
> lots of people to be worried about the direction of HAL development and
> hopes to drop it from their systems.

Nice rhetorics. Btw, I've got plenty of experience with GNU/Linux and 
UNIX in general, thanks.

>> (Of course there will always be distributions and technology enthusiasts
>> who insist on / and /usr being separate file systems - the answer here
>> will be that they need to run the udev coldplug process twice. Once
>> right after the initramfs -> real user space transition, and once as
>> part of HAL startup. That is _essentially_ what happens today anyway.)

So, Doug, If you've happen to follow the development of HAL you wouldn't 
have missed commits like this one

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal.git;a=commit;h=acb5c5d6fcf99de778a7411f59bbaf61c9b3b77b

basically stating the intention of making the build of HAL extremely 
configurable and portable. And even work with silly setups where / and 
/usr is on separate file systems.

I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to 
sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over [1]. Or, to 
put in in another way: Perhaps you should do your homework before 
attacking me and others in this way. Hope this clarifies. Thanks.

      David

[1] : It's HAL speaking! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/quotes