Re: [PATCH 3/4] usb: Un-deprecate -usbdevice (except for -usbdevice audio which gets removed)

[Thomas Huth]

On 11/03/2021 09.38, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> writes:
>
> > When trying to remove the -usbdevice option, there were complaints that
> > "-usbdevice braille" is still a very useful shortcut for some people.
> > Thus we never remove this option. Since it's not such a big burden to
> > keep it around, and it's also convenient in the sense that you don't
> > have to worry to enable a host controller explicitly with this option,
> > we should remove it from he deprecation list again.
> >
> > However, there is one exception: "-usbdevice audio" should go away, since
> > audio devices without "audiodev=..." parameter are also on the deprecation
> > list and you cannot use "-usbdevice audio" with "audiodev".
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>
>
> I accept the complaint that the replacement of "-usbdevice braille" is
> less convenient.  This is not the case for the -usbdevice tablet, mouse,
> keyboard, ccid, and wacom-tablet.

Well, if we keep "-usbdevice braille" (which we should unless somebody comes 
up with another easy to use replacement for blind people), then it also does 
not hurt too much to keep tablet, mouse, keyboard and wacom-tablet, since 
the code for these is rather simple and thus not a great burden to maintain. 
And these are mentioned in a lot of documents, scripts and howtos out there, 
so users are used to them.

However, searching for "-usbdevice ccid", I hardly get any results, so I 
guess we could also simply remove that one.

>  It is arguably the case for disk,
> serial, net, and host, yet we removed those anyway, to make the regular
> and more expressive interface the only one.

The problem with those devices was that they used their own parameter 
parsing code, including bugs we had to take care about, so there was a 
higher level of maintenance involved there. I think that alone justified 
their removal.

> However, "braille is special" is only an argument for *braille* sugar.
> It doesn't extend to -usbdevice tablet, mouse etc.  I am against
> undeprecating these.
>
> If we decide we want braille sugar, we then need to decide whether it
> should be -usbdevice braille or something else, like -braille.

I've raised that question three years ago already. Nobody stepped forward to 
implement -braille, so I think we should keep -usbdevice braille for now.

> If we can't make up our minds, keep it deprecated until we do.

We didn't make up our minds for three years now. In my eyes that's a 
decision for keeping -usbdevice braille around.

 Thomas