[BRLTTY] brltty produces an endless error message

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by hermann on 2007/02/28 at 13:36 +0100]

Hi:

>5 minutes ago brltty suddenly showed an endless message, saying
>something like "gpm no such file or directory". There was also a number
>in brackets which I cannot remember. I had toreboot my system to get
>everything back to work.
>Because I couldn't save the exact message, I cannot say more.
>I use the latest 3.8-dev from SVN.
>Is this phenomenon known and what can I do to get ridd of it?

It looks like gpm on your system, for watever reason, died. I just tested this
condition by stopping gpm and got the following set of messages:

   *** info [lib/liblow.c(329)]:
   /dev/gpmctl: No such file or directory
   *** err [lib/liblow.c(336)]:
   /dev/gpmctl: No such file or directory
   brltty: GPM open error: No such file or directory

This sequence of five messages indeed does keep getting rewritten once every
five seconds, which is because brltty tries to reestablish its connection to
gpm every five seconds. Only the last of the five messages is written by brltty
ityself, i.e. the first four are written by the gpm client library. So what 
should we do?

We could suppress the brltty error but that wouldn't really be much of a
solution since I don't know how to also suppress the gpm errors.

We could simply not try to reestablish the connection to gpm, but that'd then
require a restart of brltty once the gpm problem is fixed.

We could reduce the frequency of the retries, but that'd still leave the
recurring logs (albeit less voluminous).

What do you all think?

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