On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 10:41 AM, Martin Langhoff <martin(a)laptop.org> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 10:32 AM, Tim Niemueller
<tim(a)niemueller.de> wrote:
> But in the given situation maintenance burden just one aspect. Packaging
> something non-robotic into a "robotic udev catchall package" is a bad
idea.
Valid point. Maybe I gave too many examples -- I am preparing stuff
for only robots at the moment, but there is some ambiguity: the same
boards can be used for automation without robots.
Is "Controller boards" a better umbrella name?
cheers,
m
The maintainence thing could be eased somewhat by creating a robotics group
FAS account with commit access to robotics packages (but the robotics SIG
only really has about 3 active members at the moment who are all very busy
with other things).
There's a lot of different ways to access devices, so one solution probably
isn't going to work. For example, the Arduino package now ships with a
policykit policy and a launcher that checks to see if your user is in the
requsite dialout and lock groups[1]. It will prompt you and allow you to
add yourself to the groups if it finds you're not already a member. This is
a tidy solution for the Arduino package, and once you're in both of those
groups accessing other usb->serial devices is no longer a problem. It's
also a one-time-per-user configuration that will persist, and can be
initiated by the first package you happen to use that wants usb->serial
access.
Things like the kinect, on the other hand, don't need you to add users to
extra groups to get access. You can get by with a udev rule that sets the
camera to 0666. It looks likeboth the openni-primesense package and a
future libfreenect package could carry a udev rule to do this, and if both
udev rules do the same thing it shouldn't matter that there's two of them.
If all the NXT needs is a udev rule to set it to 0666 for people to start
using it, its easiest to have each project its own rule.
Rich
[1]
http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=arduino.git;a=blob;f=arduino-add-...