[Pm-utils] [patch commit] [015] POSIXification of pm-utils

[Stefan Seyfried]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 10:48:14AM -0600, Victor Lowther wrote:
> I agree that pushing every user-created ugly workaround into mainline
> would be a Bad Thing.  A review of them, however, might catch a common
> failure mode that we should take into account in mainline.

Yes, and this is what distro maintainers do: if i suggest the same workaround
to three bugreporters, i think about fixing it upstream

> I would not worry about you going immediatly out of business -- for
> every bug we fix or workaround, I am sure a few more will spring up.
> :)

This is a philosophy question - we kept dirty hacks out of pm-utils on
purpose. "Fix the issues, don't work around them" was the motto.
I was in the workaround business for too long with powersaved and one
reason to stop developing the powersaved suspend infrastructure and start
investing in pm-utils was, that there were too many workarounds in powersaved.

In the long run, you make things worse with workarounds - because they delay
bugfixing.

This is why i, for the SUSE packages, refuse to package up workaround hooks
and instead pushe them into the package that contains the broken driver or
the software that can not cope well with suspend. Thus the maintainer of
those packages clearly know they have a problem and have an incentive to push
upstream into fixing the bug. If this is not possible (ipw3945 comes to mind),
then at least users with sane hardware are not punished with ugly workarounds
that they don't even need).

I hope that this philosophy stays the same. If not, pm-utils will be an ugly,
unmaintainable mess soon.
-- 
Stefan Seyfried
R&D Team Mobile Devices            |              "Any ideas, John?"
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nürnberg | "Well, surrounding them's out." 

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