Re: [PATCH 6/6] USB: enable USB-PERSIST by default

[Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>]

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, Mark Lord wrote:

> Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > From: Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
> > 
> > This patch (as1052) enables USB-PERSIST for all devices by default.
> > The user won't have to remember to enable it explicitly for devices
> > containing mounted filesystems.
> > 
> > Eventually userspace tools like hal may be able to set the persist
> > attribute automatically when a filesystem is mounted on a USB device.
> > When that time comes this patch can be reverted, if people think it
> > matters.
> ..
> 
> Should the next word below be "that", rather than "this" ?

Yours is a rather obscure grammatical question, especially concerning a
Changelog entry (which is not even as significant to developers as a
comment, IMO).  What difference in meaning do you imagine replacing
"This" with "That" would achieve?

> > This approach has the advantage of giving the user the ability to turn
> > off USB-PERSIST for devices with mounted filesystems, rather than
> > making the kernel always assume it should be on.
> ...

What I meant (it probably wasn't very clear from the text) was that the
approach of leaving USB-PERSIST controlled by the power/persist
attribute and merely altering the attribute's default value is better
than having the kernel unilaterally and unconditionally turn
USB-PERSIST on for every device holding a mounted filesystem.  In other
words, the approach taken by the patch is better than the approach
suggested by Linus Torvalds.

Alan Stern