Xfce and HAL - what is the future?

[Bela Markus]

Brian

thanks for the feedback. Agree that this is a moving target at the 
moment and HAL will be used for a long time even if its is frozen today. 
Just checked my CentOS 5.3 and it comes with HAL 0.5.8.1 while latest is 
0.5.13 so all this PolicyKit, DeviceKit stuff is not used by REDHAT.

Lets see what future will bring.

Regards

Béla


Brian J. Tarricone írta:
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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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