Hal and KDM breakage (was Re: KDE4 and input events stalled)

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 16:37 -0700, Tim Kientzle wrote:
>         See /usr/ports/x11/gdm/files/gdm.in.  This is working for
>         GNOME users.
>         
> 
> I agree that kdm and xdm should have rc.d scripts.  Almost
> every other system is enabled through rc.conf and kdm and
> xdm should be the same.
> 
> But, there's an enormous amount of documentation
> all over that says to enable kdm or xdm through /etc/ttys.
> I consider this a real POLA problem.  I think that we
> need to continue to support the /etc/ttys mechanism
> for a while longer (and add a comment to the stock
> /etc/ttys to document that xdm/kdm/gdm shouldn't
> be started that way).
> 
> I also feel pretty strongly that if kdm/xdm/gdm are all started
> through rc.d, then we really have to fix the post-/etc/ttys
> dependency handling.  Your scripts are very confusing and
> basically broken.  For example, "REQUIRE: hald" has absolutely
> no effect.

Not directly, no.  The gdm script does an additional wait to make sure
lshal is working.  So hald needs to be spawned.

> 
> Of course, I'm still confused about why hald has to start
> after gettys.  I thought the whole point of hald was to monitor
> and publish changes to the system.  Why can't it do the
> same with available consoles?  Is there some missing
> kernel capability that makes this impossible?  Or is
> there an architectural issue with hald that makes this
> harder than it sounds?

It's not a question of what hal is doing, but rather how console-kit
works (and hald depends on console-kit-daemon).  It needs to be able to
monitor each of the active vtys, but won't work if the vtys haven't been
spawned yet.  Bland did some work to correct this in -CURRENT, but it
won't work on other versions.  It was just easier to leave the hack in
place.

If this could be universally fixed in all supported versions of FreeBSD,
then I would be happy to remove the hacks.

Joe

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