[BRLTTY] buglet: uinput is not autoloaded

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Samuel Thibault on 2006/03/28 at 18:46 +0200]

>My proposition was to try to open the device, if ENOENT, create the
>character node somewhere, and retry to open it. If the system is
>properly configured with correct aliases etc, the second open triggers
>autoload of uinput.

Unless anyone objects, I believe this is okay as it still lets the system do
its job. Brltty already does this sort of thing, i.e. it creates vcsa and tty
devices which it needs but don't exist, and it mounts usbfs if it's needed but
hasn't been mounted yet. All of these (including uinput) are done within code
which is already Linux-specific, so it wouldn't be introducing a portability
problem.

All this being said, I think that the udev and/or kernel people need to figure
out some sort of resolution to the basic problem that a device name doesn't
exist until it's needed while it's difficult for an application to make its
need known without access to the name. This is the very same problem I had when
trying to get my sequencer device set up correctly, and I suspect that others
are encountering it too in various other scenarios. Perhaps /dev needs some
kind of autofs-like hook so that a name, if not yet defined, can be passed
through udev as part of the open request.

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