how do we poke devs on long-opened bugs?

**prizrak** · April 13th, 2007

I suggest using a pretty big pole. Some bugs are pretty rediculous as far as how long they've been open vs how easy to fix. It took a year to get wacom-tools installed by default (how difficult was that seriously?). I have opened a bug about Acer hotkeys months ago and provided both a link to the kernel module required and the keycodes along with corresponding actions. Yet the package haven't even made it into the repos much less the main kernel free. This bug actually leads to unusable bluetooth because the default is off and to turn it on it needs the driver for the keys. (was also filed).

az · April 13th, 2007

Originally Posted by koenn

Don't think so. I had a look at mdetect - the debian tool to detect mice ; I assume Ubuntu uses it too and probably Knoppix as well althoug they've been know to borrow hardware detection tools from RedHat as well.

mdetect can produce "output appropriate for XFree86 4.x configuration" and returns error codes such as 0 (success), 1 (error occurred), 2 (no mouse found) so presumably the output is captured and written to xorg.conf. It should be fairly easy to check for errorcode '2' and start a small "assumeSerialMouseAndDealWithIt" routine
I suppose that sort of stuff is at installer level, so nothing to do with Xorg. Bedides, the comments in the bug report indicate that IF a serial mouse is detected, X is configured accordingly and stuff works. Detecting serial mice is the actual hard part, not dealing with 'no mouse found' is the bug.

Ubuntu uses dbus and HAL. Mdetect is old technology.

Originally Posted by prizrak

I suggest using a pretty big pole. Some bugs are pretty rediculous as far as how long they've been open vs how easy to fix. .... Yet the package haven't even made it into the repos much less the main kernel free. This bug actually leads to unusable bluetooth because the default is off and to turn it on it needs the driver for the keys. (was also filed).

You have to realize that not just anything can go into the kernel. What makes it into the main kernel tree is up to the kernel developers, and not Ubuntu. What Ubuntu provides on top of that is up to the technical board. If a kernel module or patch breaks other stuff, changed the kernel's ABI or is not yet stable, it just simply can't go in.

This is probably another reason why tools like automatix, which can bring in these patches, often end up breaking your system.

**koenn** · April 13th, 2007

Originally Posted by az

Ubuntu uses dbus and HAL. Mdetect is old technology.

hm ... I Looked at mdetect because it was referred to in follow up comments to that 2 year old bug report. And is dbus not more oriented to hot-plugged peripherals, where a serial mouse would be screwed tightly on to one of the serial port connectors ?
Anyway, I don't think i understand the debian (/ubuntu) installer well enough to fix this myself. On the other hand, it should be fairely easy for a setup routine to notice that no mouse was detected / is (apparently) present and then assume it must be an undetected serial mouse and act accordingly ?

**prizrak** · April 14th, 2007

Originally Posted by az

Ubuntu uses dbus and HAL. Mdetect is old technology.

You have to realize that not just anything can go into the kernel. What makes it into the main kernel tree is up to the kernel developers, and not Ubuntu. What Ubuntu provides on top of that is up to the technical board. If a kernel module or patch breaks other stuff, changed the kernel's ABI or is not yet stable, it just simply can't go in.

This is probably another reason why tools like automatix, which can bring in these patches, often end up breaking your system.

While I do agree with that, however I am using the driver and it's not screwing anything up. I understand that not everything can be in the kernel but if it were at least in the repos I would be much happier. As it stands now I have to look for a *.deb of it if I'm reinstalling.

**23meg** · April 25th, 2007

Originally Posted by Brunellus

How can we nudge the developers to fix this bug? Is there some sort of "ancient bug cleanup team?"

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