12/6/2007
No longer maintaining Gentoo’s HAL
There’s a few reasons for this. Mainly because I’m disenfranchised by the development process. Also, many Gentoo users and developers dislike HAL and are against it so I’m constantly fighting an uphill battle. But mainly it’s the development process.
For a long time I’ve felt that the development has been very one sided, by one individual. No design review, no peer review just simple code dumps every few weeks or months. Feedback is always encouraged but never read and acted upon. Bug reports go ignored.
I brought this up in the past in on the HAL ML, here. Issues with another mandatory component of HAL having code stagnating and then big code drops were brought up by a Debian developer, countered by a Fedora developer, SuSE disproves the counter as do I and another Fedora developer disagree with the counter, all in all a fun thread. Then we have David making a big code drop to which, a Debian developer and I expressed similar concerns with on the thread. And on the #hal IRC channel, another SuSE developer and Mandriva developer expressed similar concerns.
This was followed up by an IRC conversation with Rob Taylor which I have included here, the conversation takes place after receiving my reply to the last thread I’ve linked.
My biggest issue is that HAL and friends are suppose to be a FreeDesktop.org project that provides a simple and universal API to all DEs and really anything that needs hardware information and it’s designed behind closed doors and a lot of code is written behind closed doors. It’s depended on and used in projects when it’s not mature enough, for example GNOME using the 0.4 version of HAL. If David’s latest rewrite takes place that will be 3 full rewrites before it’s even hit 1.0.
Now if app was written in an open source manner, a lot of issues and problems could be addressed with the design from the get go and the code could be properly peer reviewed and we could move forward from there. Instead we have distros commonly shipping HAL with over a dozen some odd patches, not to mention the patches necessary to it’s associated utilities. I bring this point up for a very good reason, the front of FreeDesktop.org’s website states, “freedesktop.org is open source / open discussion software projects working on interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops.” Yet HAL developers will clearly admit that this project does not follow this principles and even argue that it should not follow those principles.
Because of these issues, I have given up on HAL and will no longer maintain it. In fact, I’m no longer interested in having it installed on my system. It’s time to choose another DE to use instead of GNOME.
Filed under: Gentopia, HAL, Linux
4 Responses to “No longer maintaining Gentoo’s HAL”
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December 6th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
ok, HAL is broken, what to use to replace hal?
I’m thinking even more about starting with some dumb bash script abusing dbus to make current applications happy…
December 13th, 2007 at 7:54 am
After reading the discussions, I do see the validity of a lot of your points. I do think that something like HAL is needed, however, regardless of the state of fd.o’s project.
Anyway, it’s obvious you’re fed up with it. As a user, let me say thanks for maintaining HAL for as long as you did. I’ve seen what maintaining difficult software can do to other devs, so I sympathize.
December 15th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
I can certainly understand your frustration in maintaining HAL. I don’t know how many times either RH or SUSE guys have made some piece of code pivotal, and had other projects depending on it, yet keeping the code (and/or knowhow) held back from the community until some magical date/deadline is passed. i imagine I too would be pissed in your situation.
Yet HAL, as problematic as it may be, is a *hard* requirement for GNOME, and if no one in Gentoo is maintaining it then GNOME is effectively frozen in Gentoo. And this effects me because I really love both Gentoo and GNOME and particularly the combination of both. I was looking forward to update GNOME on my system today when I encountered that HAL-0.5.10 if masked due to things you mentioned in another blog post.
I guess my question boils down to this: Have you talked with anyone else about taking over maintenance of HAL in Gentoo ?
and if HAL is not going to be maintained by anyone for a while can your (or someone else?) point out how one can compile GNOME without HAL and duplicate the functionality it provides ?
March 7th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
The biggest problem, lets put aside SuSE or Red hat in there, is that every added component to a system increases its complexity.
Personally I try to avoid anything that comes with XML as config (i use ruby to autogenerate the XML anyway, but it is still work on my part when i read it and ensure that the XML I generate does not leave out some important components)
I think so many solutions are ad-hoc solutions and everything will just break down here or there … I had it after xorg was modularized, and then we got what - evdev suddenly? But evdev had problems on its own.
The components add on to each other, but I DO NOT NEED ALL THIS. I just want things to work.
And whenever I see something that burdens me with needless complexity, I try to remove it as soon as possible.
Happily, this works most of the time.
I still hope of a xorg replacement though, can be super simple as long as I can use an editor and my browser …