11/23/2007

HAL 0.5.10 and Things TODO before hitting the tree

Cardoe wrote this in the late afternoon:

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 Responses to “HAL 0.5.10 and Things TODO before hitting the tree”

  1. Zoq-Fot-Piq Says:
    November 24th, 2007 at 4:44 am

    Hi. What exactly are these issues? Yesterday I upgrade to hal 0.5.10 and the rest of the stacks (new gnome-mount, policykit, etc.) and so far everything’s good. Or at least, everything I tried, basically automounting audiocd, dvd video, data dvd and cd, downloading photos from my digital camera and running the usual software (X, gnome, firefox, etc. etc.)

  2. Pacho Ramos Says:
    November 24th, 2007 at 4:52 am

    Thanks a lot for your great work :-)

  3. Chris Says:
    November 24th, 2007 at 9:54 am

    As I see it, the use of policykit would mean a complete change of the way permissions for devices are administrated (no more goups like plugdev, cdrom etc.). So if this is supposed to work with all packages, we will probably need some patching of many ebuilds, right? However. it sounds like a nice thing. Haven’t tried it yet.

  4. Cardoe Says:
    November 24th, 2007 at 9:59 am

    Zoq-Fot-Piq: Well currently in Bugzilla there’s issues with X crashing, with keyboard layouts being broken, keys no longer working at all. Drives no longer being able to mount because you don’t have permission. Completely failure of HAL bits interacting with KDE. But that’s only what’s been reported so far.

  5. Chris Says:
    November 24th, 2007 at 11:54 am

    Cardoe: that does not surprise me at all, as it is a key component that is being changed here.

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