PCMCIA Bluetooth Card (AnyCom CF - 300) on ARM

[Pavel Roskin]

On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 15:34 +0100, Russell King wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 12:46:08PM -0400, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> > You are using old cardmgr.  The one from pcmcia-cs 3.2.8 is fine.  I
> > think version checking was removed in 3.1.34 series (grep -B8
> > "unhelpful" CHANGES).
> 
> Ok, the "upgrade pcmcia-cs" story thus far:
> 
> In order to upgrade pcmcia-cs, I need new hwdata.
> To install new hwdata, I need new hotplug and kudzu.

That's a bug.  Data should not depend on utilities.  At worst, it can
conflict with them, which is remedied by removing the utilities.

> To install new hotplug, I need new initscripts.
> 
> To build new initscripts, I need new kudzu.
> 
> To build new kudzu, I need new pciutils.
> 
> To install new kudzu, I need new hwdata and something called "hal".
>   Spot the circular dependency.

Build pciutils, then kudzu.  Then install hwdata, hotplug, initscripts
and kudzu in the same time.

Still, you may need to ignore some dependencies to bootstrap the build
system.  That's the only practical solution to the chicken-and-egg
problem.

Red Hat (or whatever it is) is not designed for embedded systems.  I've
seen much worse dependencies, where Red Hat would force you to have X11,
sendmail, perl and C++ libraries.  Some of the dependencies can be
easily fixed, some not so easily (e.g by splitting packages), some are
pretty hard to fix without sacrificing functionality for desktop
installations.

To sum up, that's the case of "messed userspace" I mentioned before.
Either build everything from scratch, or use a distribution designed for
embedded systems.

> It's far more complex for some people than a simple "upgrade pcmcia-cs" -
> it's easy to type but in reality it is _far_ more difficult.  And this
> is why whenever we change kernel interfaces embedded folk suffer - they
> have to re-evaluate their whole userspace.
> 
> This is exactly why I disagree with removing the pcmcia ioctl interface
> soo quickly, and why removing the version ioctl was probably a bad move.

It should be easy to restore it as part of the compatibility code.

> It's been less than a year since it was introduced which gives folk a
> very small overlap.

I don't understand that.  pcmcia-cs 3.1.34 was released in June 2002,
and it doesn't need CS version.

> I wonder how many have silently already had to stick with older kernels
> because of these kinds of issues.  (On the ARM lists, I'm _constantly_
> telling folk to upgrade their kernels...)

I have no sympathy to those who use Red Hat for embedded systems without
paying for support.  It's using a wrong tool for a job.  Either hire
someone smart enough to use an embedded distribution (or make a new one,
or massage Red Hat into being one), or pay Red Hat, and have them
deliver binary packages for you.

Red Hat can refer to Fedora, Whitebox or any desktop distro.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin