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

[Andrew Reilly]

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.

> 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.)

> 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?

Cheers,

Andrew.