[Mageia-dev] latest kernels not powering off machines on shutdown

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Thierry Vignaud at 09/08/12 20:55 did gyre and gimble:
> On 9 August 2012 21:51, Colin Guthrie <mageia at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
>>>>> But even since I know it has changed, 10 years habits had me typing
>>>>> halt and then saying some bad words as it meant I would not be able to
>>>>> power it on again for a few days.
>>>>
>>>> OK, how about a compromise, "urpmi restore-broken-halt-command" which
>>>> just contains a single file /etc/profile.d/99broken-halt-command.sh
>>>> which contains:
>>>>
>>>> alias halt=poweroff
>>>>
>>>
>>> Well my own machine already has halt='halt -p' since the day I lost it
>>> like that :)
>>> What annoys me is that I don't see the point of changing the default
>>> behavior of a (quite important) command while the new default is
>>> something people would only want to use in very rare cases and will
>>> cause problems to most of them.
>>
>> Well, for me personally, I always prefer to fix things that are broken
>> and not use history as an excuse for keeping broken behaviour.
> 
> I could counter argue that's a lame excuse for breaking existing documented
> behavior. Scores of people rely on that behavior.
> 
> What's more it's an established behavior in some communauties (eg: the kernel
> one) to not break usage for the purpose to fix things if it breaks
> existing apps or
> usage.

Well as I've said if you can convince upstream I'll happily go with
that. I do not want to introduce patches for this, although I will be
happy enough with a workaround.

>> It
>> doesn't take long to adapt to new commands and the people of the future
>> will never need to learn the history behind why such a quirk exists.
> 
> And what about DMs that call "halt" ?

They can, and should be updated to call poweroff instead. Or better to
integrate into dbus and call things that way (which is needed to provide
nice warnings about other users/sessions etc. anyway).

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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