Patch to remove smbios.* keys

[Danny Kukawka]

On Sunday 21 January 2007 22:41, Richard Hughes wrote:
> Patch attached just moves the smbios.* keys to system.* and documents
> them.
>
> Is there actually using the smbios.* keys apart from HAL internally and
> hal-info? Do we need to provide backwards compat code?

I'm against removing these keys. They are not only used in HAL internally 
(please note: only because keys are maybe not in the spec does not mean 
nobody use them, at least not because the spec is never complete!), we use 
these keys for several applications on SUSE as e.g. hwinfo and yast/sax.

This is the same as before, HAL is already to important and central in the 
system to change the API without consequences. Because of this there should 
be a clear policy for API changes:
1.) avoid changes
2.) don't delete keys and replace them without a transition period under 12 
months

At least we can't remove these keys because this produce problems with the 
intention of the hal-info package if you also change/remove the keys there: 
you can't update hal-info for older HAL versions anymore - without lose 
functionality.

Danny