Bug#375395: [Pkg-cups-devel] Bug#375395: cupsys: Printer stopped working after upgrade

[Roger Leigh]

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh at debian.org> writes:

> The parallel port itself is in either PnP or ACPI tables, so the kernel
> notices it exists and fires up an coldplug event.  Udev knows to load
> parport_pc in that case.   In fact all "udev autodetection" works like this:
> it is kernel autodetection from the PnP-friendly PCI space, ACPI device
> tables, and PnPBIOS tables.
>
> So far, so good.
>
> But there is *NO* such provision for "lp", unless you told the kernel you
> wanted it built-in.

OK, this makes sense.

> If you need "lp", you either load it in through discover (which, unlike
> udev, has the task of finding out all high and low-level drivers that should
> be loaded in a system), load it in through /etc/modules, load it on an
> initscript, etc.

I just installed discover on my i386 test system, and it didn't load
lp.  I rebooted it to see what happened at startup, and it didn't load
lp then, either.

In a way, the fact that we have "lost" the facility to autoload
modules when the device node is opened, despite the existence of the
hotplug/udev/discover tools, is a usability problem.  A lot of
"optional" but necessary devices are now requiring manual intervention
to set up, which is a step backward, IMO.  Parallel ports are still
pretty common on PCs, and I don't think it should require manual set
up to use them.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
Roger Leigh
                Printing on GNU/Linux?  http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/
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