On Saturday 31 October 2009 22:36:34 Dale wrote: > Harry Putnam wrote: > > When I noticed the thread here about `hal' that started a while back > > it caused me enough curiousity that i ran eix -Ic ^hal$ but found I > > have no `hal' installed. > > > > I have keep up with updates somewhat better than usual the last few > > months but don't remember when hal went away... I do remember having > > some trouble with keyboard/mouse, and hal not starting, but that was > > quite a while back. > > > > I don't remember making a conscious effort to get rid of hal either. > > > > Evey thing seems to work ok here. I do notice a problem on bootup > > where the keyboard/mouse I have attached to a KVM does not become > > usable until AFTER the grub prompt. Somewhere between there and the > > appearance of the login prompt it becomes usable. But that has gone > > on at least a yr if not longer. > > > > So is there something wrong if I have no hal installed. Is it just > > not necessary or has it been replaced? > > I think it goes to show that a computer can work fine without hal. > Somebody nudge the KDE folks. Doesn't KDE require hal?
There's no valid technical reason why an app *must* use hal. An app can try and do all hardware detection by itself, but it just makes more sense to use one common layer for that rather than every app doing essentially the same action. KDE-4 itself does not directly require hal. Solid does though: $ equery depends hal * Searching for hal ... app-emulation/wine-1.1.32 (hal ? sys-apps/hal) app-laptop/laptop-mode-tools-1.52 (hal ? sys-apps/hal) app-misc/hal-cups-utils-0.6.19 (>=sys-apps/hal-0.5.10) app-misc/hal-info-20090716 (>=sys-apps/hal-0.5.10) kde-base/solid-4.3.2 (>=sys-apps/hal-0.5.9) media-gfx/gimp-2.6.7 (hal ? sys-apps/hal) media-libs/libgphoto2-2.4.7 (hal ? >=sys-apps/hal-0.5) media-libs/libgpod-0.7.2 (hal ? =sys-apps/hal-0.5*) media-video/gxine-0.5.903 (hal ? sys-apps/hal) media-video/vlc-1.0.3_rc (hal ? sys-apps/hal) net-misc/networkmanager-0.7.1_p20090824 (>=sys-apps/hal-0.5.10) sys-apps/pcsc-lite-1.5.5 (hal ? sys-apps/hal) sys-power/pm-utils-1.2.5 (>=sys-apps/hal-0.5.10) x11-base/xorg-server-1.7.1 (hal ? sys-apps/hal) x11-drivers/xf86-input-synaptics-1.2.0 (hal ? sys-apps/hal) x11-libs/e_dbus-9999 (sys-apps/hal) There's nothing wrong with the *idea* of hal; it's the implementation of that app that makes it an utter piece of shit. It's called "feature-creep". Even it's author knows this (but apparently many distros do not) which is why he deprecated hal and started over with devicekit. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
