0.5.8 goals and TODO list updated

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2006-08-08 at 16:24 -0700, Artem Kachitchkine wrote:
> > It's about being specific - Lock() means "please don't invoke any
> > methods on the device object, I'm busy using it" while InhibitPolling()
> > means "please stop polling for media changes". These use-cases are
> > mutually exclusive.
> 
> Right. There's one thing that makes these two methods alike: if a process exits 
> without invoking the "un"-method, HAL should enforce it.

Yea, we do this already for Lock() and plan to do it for
InhibitPolling() as well...

> We could probably generalize this idea beyond storage: for any device class, if 
> it requires device activity, userland or kernel, to keep its state up to date, a 
> pair of methods (Freeze/Unfreeze?) could be used to suspend this activity 
> temporarily.

Yea, hmm, I don't know. 

I actually do like being verbose and specific. Just calling it Freeze()
instead of InhibitPolling() and whatever specific names we come up
with... is kinda like the Win32 CreateFile() API that does everything
under the sun (and twice on Sundays) instead of the sane POSIX API where
the functionality is split into open(2), stat(2) etc.... Dunno...

    David