Hal spec and PropertyModifed

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 14:38 +0000, Matthew Johnson wrote:
> I've been trying to write an application that runs a script whenever the
> link status on a network interface changes, using Hal to signal the
> change. 

Starting with hal 0.5.x we don't report link changes as it broke with a
lot of badly written drivers. NetworkManager supports this though.

> Here are the problems I've run into:
> 
> Hal doesn't support introspection, and silently drops introspection
> requests (the latter is apparently fixed in HEAD)

News to me. AFAIK we still need to add introspection support in HAL.

> The Hal spec for org.freedesktop.Hal.Device is wrong:
> (http://cvs.freedesktop.org/*checkout*/hal/hal/doc/spec/hal-spec.html?only_with_tag=HEAD#AEN3684)

Yea, patches are welcome please.

> void Condition(string condition, ...)
> 
> If ... is meant to be multiple arguments and not a variant, is this
> supported at all? 

This has changed, the arguments are now fixed - the idea about multiple
arguments was a mistake as I didn't think about introspection when I
wrote the spec more than two years ago.

> A *correct* specification of the signals somewhere would be nice, in any
> format,

At this point your best bet is to look at the source code for libhal

 http://cvs.freedesktop.org/*checkout*/hal/hal/libhal/libhal.c?content-type=text%2Fplain

to figure out the format of the signals. Ideally we get to fix the spec
and, even better, add introspection at some point.

Good luck,
David