Comment 3 for bug 2012207

There is really no perfect solution here. I blame the manufacturers for not changing the idVendor/idProduct of the usb-to-serial converters in their products.

Anyway, my take on this bug is: this is actually a bug in the d/p/gpsd_hotplug_rules_disable_generic_serial_converters Debian patch [0]. Rationale:

1. Debian patched away the udev rule that covers pl2303 serial converters, see [1, 2]. This happened about 8 years ago.

2. Four years ago gpsd upstream added another pl2303 udev rule meant to start a service when a pl2303 usb device is detected. This is [3], the change Lucas found. This is not covered by the patch [0].

3. Either the patch fully comments out the pl2303 udev rules, or it leaves both of them active (as upstream intended). The pl2303 is extremely common, so I think it's correct to patch it out.

Ideally this should be fixed in Debian by expanding [0].

@Kristopher are you interested in filing a gpsd Debian bug with this information to help the bug fixing process? There is a similar bug already filed [4].

I doubt this is SRU material, as some production systems may rely on the udev rule [3] for starting up the gpsdctl service.

[0] https://salsa.debian.org/debian-gps-team/pkg-gpsd/-/blob/master/debian/patches/gpsd_hotplug_rules_disable_generic_serial_converters
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=696020
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/debian-gps-team/pkg-gpsd/-/commit/72a6a4af
[3] https://gitlab.com/gpsd/gpsd/-/commit/c0c0e53d7fe400cde49398bdcce024fb9eb1d51b
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=884744