hal care, feeding and integration (was Re: USB2 and USB mice)

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

Andrew Reilly wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 01:27:58AM -0500, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
>> The FreeBSD GNOME Team maintains a user-level hal FAQ at
>> http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/halfaq.html .  We don't have any
> 
> I've found that one, and must read it again, as reading it did
> not result in me being able to mount a CD-ROM (I have submitted
> a PR with the copious output requested on that page).  The
> caveat about GEOM labels with spaces: does that apply to CD-ROM
> images with a space in the label name?  That appears to have
> been squashed out at the GEOM Label stage, but it's not
> something that I can do anything about: the CD-ROM is what it
> is.

If the output of sysctl -b kern.geom.conftxt produces names with spaces,
then hal will not be able to mount the volume.

> 
>> FreeBSD-specific development docs.  However, the hal spec at
>> http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/hal-spec/hal-spec.html is a good
>> starting point.
> 
> That looks like exactly what I was looking for, thanks!  I'll
> give it a good read.
> 
>>> Also, is there a FreeBSD hald-meister, whos job it is to ensure that hal
>>> continues to reflect up-to-date FreeBSD capabilities and mechanisms?
>> That's me.  I'd really appreciate help as I don't have all of the
>> requisite hardware or expertise in all of the subsystems.  For instance,
>> we're completely lacking SD/MMC, firewire, and printer functionality.
> 
> I've got a firewire external drive and a firewire cardbus
> reader, which could be useful for testing?  The drive seems to
> work fine from /etc/fstab.  Haven't tried to get hal to use it,
> yet.  Haven't tried the cardbus reader (mostly use that on my
> MacBook.)

Unless people are willing to ship me hardware, I will have to rely on
them for developing the underlying support code in hal.

> 
>> Some of this has been posted on FreeBSD's idea page for some time.
> 
> I'll have a look, thanks.
> 
>>From an overall philosiphical perspective, is hal something that
> we're going to be able to get comfortable with, as Unix admins?
> Is it a piece of infrastructure that has just been missing from
> traditional Unix, or does the move for Xorg and Gnome to require
> it mean that those projects are "doing it wrong"?  If the
> former, do you see a time when we'll want a pure-BSD version
> that just ships as a standard part of the base system, or will
> it always be a port?

Hal (of the upcoming DeviceKit) will always be a port.

Joe

> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Andrew.
> 


-- 
Joe Marcus Clarke
FreeBSD GNOME Team	::	gnome at FreeBSD.org
FreeNode / #freebsd-gnome
http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome