Use a specific device ?

[Bjørn Mork]

Jean-Christian de Rivaz <jc at eclis.ch> writes:

> There is not so
> much modem manufacturers and each of them don't even release a new
> product range per year.

Ehh... I don't think we live on the same planet.  Did you know Toshiba
is a "modem manufacturer"? Dell? HP? There are 43 (damn - I would have
loved to see 42) different vendor IDs just in the option driver:

 bjorn at nemi:/usr/local/src/git/linux$ git grep -E '^#define.*VENDOR' drivers/usb/serial/option.c |wc -l
 43

Feel free to start updating the whitelists in vendor specific drivers
like option, qcserial and qmi_wwan. Please let me know when those are
complete.

No, I don't seriously expect you to do that job.  Fact is that the
whitelists are unmaintablable even when the scope is limited to one
specific mode of Qualcomm based modems.  Keeping a semi-complete
whitelist of all modems is not going to happen.

> The 40-usb_modeswitch.rules required by some
> modems is not so big either.

There are approximately a gazillion modem IDs which do *not* need mode
switching.  But list size is irrelevant in any case.  See below.

> But most important is to understand that the current ModemManager is
> abusing the udev concept and confusing the users. Are you really
> serious when you ask a random people with a new UPS product to add a
> new udev rule to the ModemManager project?

Why do they have to do that? Their UPS should work fine even if MM
happens to probe it.

> I think you are so focused
> on defending the current ModemManager abomination that you fail to see
> the problem from the point of view of a common user.

So, let's try to agree what a common user wants.  My claim is that the
common user wants *both* their UPS and 3G modem to work by default.

> The length of a
> white list is not an excuse to not fix the problem.

Agreed.  The length is irrelevant. The problem is that the list will be
incomplete, whether it is a blacklist or whitelist. We could probably
discuss which one will be easiest to maintain, but that's really
irrelevant too. The real question is what happens to the user
requirements in the two cases, assuming that we don't have any prior
knowledge of the devices (which is very likely for any device you can
buy new in a store):

whitelist:
 UPS works
 3G modem fails

blacklist:
 UPS works, but is unnecessarily probed by MM
 3G modem works

The choice is really simple, isn't it? MM does what it has to do.


Bjørn