udev versus parallel-port Zip drive

[walt <wa1ter@myrealbox.com>]

I've been fiddling with Zip-drive support -- both USB and
parallel-port.

When I compile everything as modules I find that the
parallel-port driver for Zip drives (ppa) does not load
automatically.  To make the parallel Zip drive work I
need to do a 'modprobe ppa' manually, after which everything
works as expected.

I can only imagine the complexity involved in figuring out
what is attached to the parallel port at boot-time -- there
must be thousands of possibilities to sort through.

My question, I suppose, is:  what are the chances that a
parallel-port device can be automatically detected by udev
and the appropriate module loaded?  Is this a pipe-dream?
Or maybe it should already work and I'm just omitting some
important steps?

Any thoughts or suggestions?