HAL is in maintenance mode

[Kay Sievers]

Hey,
to clarify some confusion about HAL:

The goal is to get entirely rid of HAL, at least on Linux systems.
We will no longer accept any new features, only bug fixes,
or hal-info entries and fixes. There will be no future release with
major new features, or support for new device types.

If distros ship bug fixes for the current HAL in their packages,
please send them now, so we can integrate them and include them in
a new maintenance release. If distros already added new features
in their packages, please consider to dropping them, or let us
find out how to possibly integrate them now, if its simple enough.


The development has moved and focuses on udev and the DeviceKit-*
projects, please integrate new features there.

There is a separation between udev and the higher layer projects:
Udev will exist on almost every Linux system, and low-level users
can enumerate all current devices and listen to events with libudev.
Applications can expect udev to always be active on the system.

For higher-level projects there are specific susbsystem services,
like DeviceKit-disks, DeviceKit-power, NetworkManager, PulseAudio,
... They all connect to the system device information with libudev,
but provide their higher-level interfaces.

Unlike HAL, applications can not always expect that all these
services are available. Customized systems or large servers may
not be able to run them, or may not even want to install them for
whatever reasons. Usual desktop installations will likely pull-in
most of these services as dependencies though.

Thanks,
Kay