Xfce and HAL - what is the future?

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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On 10/05/2009 02:38 AM, Bela Markus wrote:

> What is about future Xfce releases and HAL?

We'll continue to use HAL, though probably won't add any new features
that depend on HAL.

The solutions that replace HAL: udev/gudev, DeviceKit, DeviceKit-disks,
DeviceKit-power, etc., are still in a bit of flux, and I think we should
wait before committing to using any of them.  They're also only
supported and available on the latest versions of a couple Linux distros
(personally, I won't be developing against it until I can install it via
distro packages).

HAL will be around for some time; the main DeviceKit architect
explicitly designed DK to be able to run in parallel with HAL.

Now, 4.6 relies heavily on HAL, but mostly just in Thunar, and, to some
extent, xfdesktop (indirectly).  Thunar has been ported to use GIO as
its VFS backend, which removes the hard HAL dependency (though some
dependencies in exo remain).  Xfdesktop will be ported as well.  It may
actually be possible to run 4.8 without HAL and still get most of the
important functionality (assuming you're willing to install GVfs), but
only time will tell how much HAL is left.

Jannis has some plans to write a simple replacement for a couple of the
important parts of GVfs (like the volume monitor)... he can better talk
about what's going on there.

Frankly, all this is a bit disappointing.  While HAL never lived up to
its promise as being cross platform (I think it runs on just Linux and
FreeBSD), udev/gudev/DK don't have any illusions of being suitable for
use on other OSes (though in theory a DK DBus interface implementation
for another OS is possible).  So even with full udev/DK support, I'd
expect to see some HAL fallbacks in Xfce if people care about them.

	-brian
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