Re: Requirements definition

[Miles Lane <miles megapathdsl net>]

Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > * Full hardware detection/configuration. (is this possible?)
>
> Yeah, there was a thread on gnome-hackers about this a while back, people
> were talking about kudzu and the like. All the databases that exist, etc.
> There's a librarised system that does this sort of stuff (libdetect or
> something), but I haven't checked it out (it's in Debian if anyone wants to
> try it).

Jeff and Mikael,

You might want to check out the CML2 flameout war on the linux-kernel
mailing list.  Part of the work that ESR and some of his contributors
were working on for CML2 was a full system hardware scanning scripts.
This was going to be used to autoconfigure a kernel tree for your
machine.  They had a lot of it working.  

Most of the work on this was done by Giacomo Catenazzi <cate debian org>.

It may be useful to you to read the message thread, since there
was a fairly thorough debate of the feasibility of doing a thorough
detection.  Things get really tricky for video cards, USB devices,
IR, and so on.  Unfortunately, the noise level on this discussion
is really, really high.  

Giacomo,

We are exploring setting up a hardware detection system for a 
Gnome project.  Do you think your owkr for CML2 might be a good
start for this piece of the project?

	Miles