OT: Re: evil, undocumented, periodic, little critters in GNOME

[John Gotts <jgotts ww2 tqstats com>]

In message <20000715093128.B16041@mir.netapp.com>, Andy Kahn writes:

>I recall seeing an email thread about this a couple of months ago, but
>the exact subject escapes me.

>Basically, after a new installation of various helix GNOME bits on a
>RedHat 6.2 system, I noticed that every ten seconds or so, my hard
>drive light would go on, indicating some periodic disk activity.

>I tracked it down to a daemon called "magicdev", and with no surprise,
>it had no man page.  Fortunately(?), the RPM information was
>available:

>Name        : magicdev                     Relocations: (not relocateable)
>Version     : 0.2.7                             Vendor: Red Hat, Inc.
>Release     : 1                             Build Date: Wed 08 Mar 2000 02:45:
>53 PM PST
>Install date: Mon 10 Jul 2000 02:29:59 PM PDT      Build Host: porky.devel.red
>hat.com
>Group       : Applications/System           Source RPM: magicdev-0.2.7-1.src.r
>pm
>Size        : 46217                            License: GPL
>Packager    : Red Hat, Inc. <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla>
>Summary     : A GNOME daemon for automatically mounting/playing CDs.
>Description :
>Magicdev is a daemon that runs within the GNOME environment and
>detects when a CD is removed or inserted. Magicdev handles running
>autorun programs on the CD, updating the File Manager and playing
>audio CDs.

>Taking a wild guess, I reasoned it was behaving like a Windows system
>would, and stupidly trying to mount the cdrom drive.  So I went into
>the control-center settings, and turned off the "automatically mount"
>option for cd's.  Bingo.

>This binary should have a man page, and so should a lot of other
>binaries that GNOME conveniently adds as a virus, err, helper.

You must not have read the message I posted on this list a few days ago.  Since
the only IDE device in my IBM IntelliStation is a CD-ROM, magicdev freezes the
system completely while the IDE modules are reloaded when magicdev checks for
the presence of a CD.

My development machine at home is configured similarly, except that the CD-ROM
sits on an infrequently-used SCSI bus.  I haven't installed Red Hat 6.2 on that
system yet, but the Adaptec aic7xxx driver freezes the machine for an even
longer period when its modules are reloaded.

If a newbie ran into either of these problems, he would think that his system
was unstable.  Heck, I've been using Linux since 1994 and I was momentarily
concerned.

Red Hat has been very good about adding new features to Linux and has also
paved the way for new standards like System V-style initialization scripts
(which Red Hat has leveraged further than SysV could ever have dreamed of),
PAM, magicdev, and many others, but they hasn't been very good about
documenting these features.  Since, at least initially, these things exist only
on Red Hat systems, Red Hat should at least write some documentation for them.
One counterexample is RPM, but its usage has always struck me as arcane unless
you are doing something trivial so you had better have a man page!

Red Hat has great developers, but I don't think they have enough writers.
(They certainly ought to be able to afford to pay them.)  Free software
developers don't like to write docmentation, but it's a different matter when
you're backed by a company that's paying you for it.

I've flagged this message at OT because it's only marginally related to GNOME,
but it is true that gnome installs a lot of binaries sans man page or any
documentation at all, really.

John

--
John GOTTS <jgotts@linuxsavvy.com>  http://www.linuxsavvy.com/staff/jgotts