Doug Goldstein

Basically some people keep asking when HAL 0.5.10 is going to hit the Portage tree. Well there’s a few more things that need to be hashed out first.

• Do we really want to go with the PolicyKit route? Right now I’m leaning towards yes since this allows for granualar controls of permissions from HAL and future versions of HAL will require it so might as well bite the bullet. But this will require some more discussion with the other distro maintainers since David Zeuthen has pretty much disappeared from developement. If we go with PolicyKit that will require some more bits:
  • Document and explain PolicyKit and how it works and why it exists.
  • Work with Diego to merge in the necessary ConsoleKit bits into the PAM configuration. Test and evaluate the non-PAM routes for users like compnerd.
  • Clean up the few gotchas that testing has uncovered with PolicyKit.
• dberkholz, seemant, dang, leio and a few users in #gentoo-desktop have been having problems with the HAL version in Gentopia, we need to work with each of these users to resolve the issues and get those fixes into the ebuild or the code.
• Test KDE. No idea if it works with the new HAL.
• Document the new xorg-server interactions with HAL and how users can solve their configuration issues. Also work up some proper defaults if need be.
• Fix all the known memory leaks and merge the necessary patches from upstream and from the mailing list.
• Review all the issues that SuSE and Debian unstable have had in switching to HAL 0.5.10 and ensure we have all those use cases covered.
• Decide what our minimum supported kernel is. Technically, HAL supports as low as kernel 2.6.19 but there are still some issues.
• Publish a git tree with all of the patches

Right now the only machine that I have HAL working nicely on is running about 25 extra patches, all of which have been cherry picked from upstream or the ML or written by others to addresses issues we’ve found. I haven’t had the time necessary to do much maintenance and code writing for HAL so I’ve been a bit neglectful of the package.

I hope this answers everyone’s questions of what needs to happen with HAL 0.5.10 before it hits the tree.

Filed under: General, HAL, Linux
5 Comments

Robin was having issues with a CD-ROM drive that caused his system to hard lock whenever HAL was started. Now HAL ships with hal-disable-polling that allows you disable polling of the CD-ROM drive for media changes however this still does not prevent HAL from scanning the drive when HAL starts up. When HAL starts up it sends your ATAPI devices a capabilities query and it appears this query is what’s causing robbat2’s issue. So we had to come up with a custom FDI file to make HAL ignore the device entirely.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="block.device" string="/dev/hda">
<merge key="info.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

Drop into a file and save it into /etc/hal/fdi/preprobe and viola, HAL will completely ignore this device and you will be all set.

Edit: I was asked to provide a license under which the above snippet is under. Basically, do with the above what you wish. So it’s under a 2-clause BSD license, copyright to me, Doug Goldstein (Doug Klima) effective from the date this post was made. A copy of a 2-clause BSD license is available at: http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html

Filed under: General, HAL, Linux
2 Comments

So, Diego and I quickly implemented USE flag descriptions for individual packages by using metadata.xml. I wanted to give everyone a concrete example of what we intended and what’s the goal of this project. So, I’ve added USE flag descriptions to HAL’s metadata.xml. To see an example check it out in sources.gentoo.org.

Filed under: General, Linux
3 Comments

Do you use Heimdal and Gentoo? Do you use Gentoo and are interested in Kerberos? Do you use Kerberos and have an interest in Gentoo? Do you know something about Kerberos and Gentoo?

Well you get the idea. We need a new Heimdal maintainer badly. Please e-mail Seemant and I if you’re interested it helping out. We’d sure appreciate it.

Oh and if you’re an MIT Kerberos guy, that’s ok too. MIT Kerberos maintenance could use a hand as well.

Heimdal bugs in Gentoo Bugzilla

Filed under: General, Linux
2 Comments

Well following up Diego’s post about the same subject, I too think we need some metadata about what each USE flag does exactly. If you read Diego’s post, my original suggestion was to use use.local.desc but Diego suggested actually using metadata.xml.

After some debate in #gentoo-dev about a good syntax we have setted on the following:
<use> <!-- lang is optional, like in the rest of metadata fields -->
<flag name="disk-partition">Uses libparted from <pkg>sys-apps/parted</pkg> to read partition tables and in the future allow for partition table modification.</flag>
</use>

The new flags added are “use” which has an optional  lang attribute to specify additional languages. Then “flag” which does your heavy lifting via the name attribute. And lastly, I proposed adding “pkg” which would allow cross-linking/referencing from packages.gentoo.org (this was discussed with jokey) and additional apps like kuroo. The “pkg” tag would also be added to “longdescription”.

The final updated metadata.dtd can be seen at http://dev.gentoo.org/~cardoe/files/metadata.dtd and the diff at http://dev.gentoo.org/~cardoe/files/metadata.diff.

Filed under: General, Linux
4 Comments

I’ve decided to change my last name back to my biological father’s last name, the last name that I was born and had until 10th grade. In 10th grade I changed my last name to my step father’s last name since my biological father had passed away when I was 8 years old. However, my mother and my step father separated over a year ago and after discussing it with my fiancee, Rachel, I had decided to revert back to my previous name.

So, if anyone sees Doug Klima start to pop up in Gentoo and else where in the open source community, that’s just me.

Filed under: General, Personal
1 Comment