Am Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:58:18 -0400 schrieb "Michael P. Soulier" <msoul...@digitaltorque.ca>:
> On 13/04/09 Mike Edenfield said: > [...] > > Also, just for the record, hal isn't by any stretch of the imagination a > > "new" daemon. Its been a USE option for Gentoo's gnome-vfs package since > > Gnome 2.8, in 2004. > > Yes, and at the Ottawa Linux Symposium a talk was given entitled, "How users > space sucks". > > http://lwn.net/Articles/192214/ > > "HAL was responsible for opening almost 2000 files. It will read various XML > files, then happily reopen and reread them multiple times. The bulk of these > files describe hardware which has never been anywhere near the system in > question. Clearly, this is an application which could be a little smarter > about how it does things." I remember when I first read that. Needless to say, I was shocked that such a gruesome thing could ever be possible. I can't wait for it to be replaced (though I undoubtedly will). > One member of the audience claimed that hald's repeated probing of his > Thinkpad's CDROM drive to see if a CD had been inserted was responsible for > killing it. > > That said it doesn't seem to be going away so I really must go through some > tutorial on it. Actually, exactly that seems to be happening just now. The designated replacement for HAL is apparently DeviceKit: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2008-May/011560.html http://cgit.freedesktop.org/DeviceKit/DeviceKit/commit/?id=a36a7f24413b4663731fa0d92252c74366ceeedb From the first link: "This is a simple system service that a) can enumerate devices; b) emits signals when devices are added removed; c) provides a way to merge device information / quirks onto devices. And that's it. A device is identified by a) the native OS-specific path (on Linux a sysfs path); b) an optional UNIX device file; and c) key/value pairs describing the device. It's a very simple service, a bit like what HAL is today without all the probers/callouts" and "So what happens with HAL? Applications will continue to use it and we will still do bug-fix releases when necessary. But no patches for new features will be accepted. I expect most distros to keep shipping it (Fedora certainly will) as some apps will take some time to get ported over. And the enterprise releases will need to support it for many years. So it's not like we're going to ignore it, I just won't accept patches for new features. I hope that's understandable." And from the latter link the updated description: "DeviceKit is an abstraction for enumerating devices and listening to device events. Any application on the system can access the org.freedesktop.DeviceKit service via the system message bus. On GNU/Linux, DeviceKit can be considered a simple D-Bus frontend to udev(7)." According to the latter link, apparently even this replacement has been replaced... where to I'm not really sure. It's now part of 'udev-extras', whatever that is. +NOTE NOTE NOTE: This is probably the last release of DeviceKit. The + functionality of DeviceKit is going to be merged into the + udev-extras with the only changes being the D-Bus name + as well as the prefix for the GObject library and the + command line tool. If anybody has more information, I'd be very interested. All I know is that it is available in the Gnome overlay (see http://github.com/uzytkownik/gnome-overlay/tree/3fc78b5b8d961f5b3cff307b883a69e8e9119bc3/sys-apps). [...] > > Mike -- Marc Joliet -- Lt. Frank Drebin: "It's true what they say: cops and women don't mix. Like eating a spoonful of Drāno; sure, it'll clean you out, but it'll leave you hollow inside."
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