hotplug

Today I got a digital camera working under linux for the first time over usb. This was really pretty easy, what was not so easy was debugging a hotplug problem that ran the script I'd set up twice when the camera was plugged in. What is it about applications like pcmcia and hotplug that call for vast, evil, undocumented shell scripts in /etc? Have these people never heard of the unix tools philospohy? Argh!

Support for hotplugged devices is an area where Debian could lead and excel in integration, but things like the README.Debian of libgphoto2-2 are depressing:

These scripts are intented to be used with a front-end application. libgphoto2 is not a front-end application. I will close all bug reports asking for an automatic installation of one of these scripts during the installation of the libgphoto2 packages (same thing for print-usb-usermap).

The scripts in question are mostly badly designed and broken hacks, but there seems to be little desire to find a right way to handle these things, and make Debian do it. Instead we're happy with packaging broken hacks in examples/ and refusing to support them. Meanwhile, other distributions do fairly useful things by default when usb devices are plugged in, and get good reviews.