hal scripts cannot do INT32

[Kay Sievers]

On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 13:35, <danny at mailmij.org> wrote:

> The first issue is a race condition. Apparently, on the moment the backlight device
> is created, hal tries to read the maximum brightness. Even although there is only a
> short code path between device creation and the set of the max brightness, apparently the
> kernel gets preempted, and hal reads 0 from sysfs.

Are you sure, the sysfs file is already created that time or it possibly isn't?

> The problem is
> that although shell scripts can do exit ${value}, with a value over 256, this value
> can not be realiable read by reading the child exit status in C. Only a 16 bit integer
> can be read like this, and thus my hal version is wrapping the 1000 possible brightness
> levels returned by sysfs.

You mean 8 bit, I guess?

> I'm not sure if the plan is to remove all the shell scripts and move to C, or that everybody is sue 16 bits are enough even although the api specifies a 32 bit int.

We are currently moving away from HAL to DeviceKit, so any major
changes in HAL seem unlikely. For new stuff DeviceKit-power,
DeviceKit-disks should be focused on.

Thanks,
Kay