Re: usbutils 0.81 release

[Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 21:18, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
<hmh@hmh.eng.br> wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Apr 2009, Kay Sievers wrote:
>> >>> looks like update-usbids.sh was forgotten from EXTRA_DIST in
>> >>> Makefile.am so the released tarball doesnt have the script ;(
>>
>> > np, i'll send patches for both
>>
>> Ah missed that, sorry. Sounds good if you add it to the tarball, but
>> please don't add it to "make install", as packages should not ship
>> scripts which change the installed package content, unless it's a
>> config file.
>
> Debian places it in /var/lib/usbids/ for a good reason.  So does Ubuntu.
> Both have working "update-usbids" scripts (might be the one from upstream,
> or something different).  They also have the original file in /usr/share, I
> don't know if usbutils was changed to check /var first then /usr, or what.

Having several files on the same system sounds crazy from a distro
standpoint. There needs to be only a single database by default. Users
can do whatever they want anyway, but packages should not support such
a thing.

If the user updates it, what does a new ids file do? Overwrite it
unconditionally? Keep the old outdated hanging around, and lsusb does
not pick the new one up? That sounds like total a mess.

Thanks,
Kay