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

Thu Aug 9 22:28:21 CEST 2012

'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
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
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+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
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+