[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#525495: Please provide a minimal hal package

[Harald Braumann]

Hi,

On Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:59:16 +0200
Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org> wrote:

> Michael Biebl wrote:
> > Hi Harry,
> > 
> > I agree with you, that HAL has somewhat grown into a kitchensync
> > over its lifetime. Unfortunately it's not easily, if at all
> > possible to rip HAL apart in smaller pieces (that's why I mark the
> > bug as wontfix).
My main concerns are callouts and addons. These are enabled in
/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/*.fdi. So these fdi files could be
put in a separate package and people who don't care about this cruft
could choose to not install it.

There is, however, a much simpler solution: attached you can find fdi
files that completely disable addons and callouts. Could you please add
them to the package as examples and mention them in README.Debian?

Or maybe put them in preferences.fdi as commented out blocks.

With these files in place, the only root process remaining is
hald_runner. But since all callouts are removed, the risk should be
minimised (modulo bugs in hald, like buffer overflows, that could be
exploited to invoke hald_runner with arbitrary scripts).

> > 
> > On the other hand, there is work underway to replace HAL with
> > something new, more modular, called DeviceKit, where you have
> > separate components (e.g. DeviceKit-power, DeviceKit-disks), which
> > can be installed separately and will deprecate/replace HAL step by
> > step.
> > 
> 
> See also:
> DeviceKit ITP: http://bugs.debian.org/521361
> DeviceKit-power ITP: http://bugs.debian.org/521363
> DeviceKit-disks ITP: http://bugs.debian.org/521364

In my opinion still the wrong approach. Information about hardware
should be made available in a file system similar to sysfs, maybe a
fuse fs. There's no need for daemons, D-Bus, etc. The interface would
then just be regular file operations and notification would be done
using inotify. But at least it's an improvement over HAL. Still it will
take time until Xorg moves to DeviceKit, if ever.

Cheers,
harry

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