hal-info: making hardware updates easier

[Richard Hughes]

Right. A few minutes of odd time from DavidZ and myself has produced a
fully working hal-info[1]. By fully working, I mean it's a git repo
(with autotools glue) we can start using, but contains no data yet.

The idea is to leave policy and probing fdi stuff in the main hal fdi
directories, but move information matching into hal-info. This means
distros/users can update hal-info for the latest hardware matches
without worrying about hal updates that might break other stuff or
introduce new deps.

For example: the CSR wireless device support will be split, so device
matching on USB VID/PIDs is done in hal-info and actually launching the
addon will be done in hal.

I expect the battery matching and bios update stuff can be done in
hal-info too, although new properties should still be documented in the
spec in the main hal tree.

I think we should make it clear that distros will have to package
hal-info for what is going to be hal 0.5.9 as it won't work properly
without it!

Obvious files to transfer over:
10-camera-ptp.fdi
10-cd-dvd-burner.fdi
10-usb-card-readers.fdi
10-usb-music-players.fdi
10-usb-pda.fdi
10-usb-zip-drives.fdi

and then we can start thinking about any new ones. David, okay to
transfer over the files listed above?

We will also need to change ./run-hald.sh to look in the new
directories, and we'll have to assume that hal-info is checked out in
the same level directory as hal (which is think is okay).

We'll also have to add to the README for hal something like:

"You will need to install the hal-info package for HAL do do anything
useful" - better wording appreciated. It might also be a good idea to
add this as a warning at the end of the configure output as this will
better get our target audience in my opinion.

The idea for versioning is for hal-info to use the date (e.g. 20061024)
for it's version, and for hal to not depend on any particular version of
hal-info. The idea being, hal is released every few months, but a new
release of hal-info every couple of weeks would be no bad thing.

So, flames, comments?

Thanks,

Richard

[1] http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal-info.git;a=summary