PCMCIA & udev changes

[Bill Nottingham]

Beginning tomorrow, the following changes will be in rawhide:

- pcmcia-cs will be replaced with the new pcmciautils

- udev will be upgraded to 062

What does this mean for you, the user?

- PCMCIA support should be better. Notably, 16-bit PCMCIA support will be
  going through the same hotplug, etc. mechanisms as Cardbus, PCI, and other
  devices.

- Certain operations should be faster. The new udev internalizes some of
  the mechanisms that were farmed out to scripts before (such as
  loading of modules for PCI, PCMCIA/Cardbus, and USB), so things should
  be faster.

What does this mean for you, the developer?

- The use of /etc/hotplug.d and /etc/dev.d for the running of programs on
  hotplug and udev events is officially deprecated.
  
  All programs that have been run in this way need to be converted to
  RUN targets in udev rule files; these can be dropped in /etc/udev/rules.d.
  Old dev.d and hotplug.d events will still be run in a compatibility mode
  for now... I'm not yet sure how long we will continue to do so.

What sort of problems could arise, and where should they be filed?

- All matching of of PCMCIA devices to drivers is done via standard module
  aliases. /etc/pcmcia/config is no longer used.
  
  If your driver isn't loaded properly, bugs should be filed against 'kernel';
  ids will need to be added to the drivers.

- Not everything may be converted to new udev rules yet. For things that aren't,
  please file bugs against the relevant packages.

And, of course, there could be something that's just plain broken. :)

This isn't going to be the last device handling change; these changes
allow further tweaks to udev, hotplug, and related packages. Hopefully
nothing will break too badly along the way.

Bill