Mapping form factor

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 16:46 +0200, Kay Sievers wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 16:35, Richard Hughes<hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2009/7/2 Kay Sievers <kay.sievers at vrfy.org>:
> >> No, better don't stuff things into the dmi device, not all platforms have that.
> >
> > Then where in the database should this data go?
> 
> There is no place in udev so far. We can't do that unless we invent
> some fake device, or global properties.

Yeah, and faking devices in udev seems like a slippery slope, not sure
we want to do that.

Maybe just stashing this info on the DMI device for now is the way
forward? If it turns out that non-DMI platforms wants something like
this, then we can always change stuff.

Or maybe it turns out that we don't want something like this at all - I
mean, you can't really trust DMI data in the first place so it's rather
optimistic what Richard is trying to do. E.g. we don't want to give out
potentially wrong data.

> >> This?  http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~david/xdg-hostname/
> >
> > That's the hostname, not the formfactor... Confused.
> 
> Oh, it handles icons and such stuff for the host, so I thought it
> would be a place to stuff the form-factor, which basically corresponds
> to the icon, i guess:
>   xdg_hostname_monitor_set_icon_name
> 
> David may know better.

While we could teach xdg-hostname about things like this, it reminds
meof feature-creep.. so I'm not sure we want to do that - I also feel it
goes against our goal of removing hal in order to have a single store
(udev) where device information is stored in a quirkable way (e.g.
vendors can drop udev rules to change values, if we were to store this
in xdg-hostname it would be yet another place where vendors needed to
modify stuff).

(Also, xdg-hostname is still very experimental, no-one ships it yet and
I haven't got time to finish it (it's item #42 on my TODO list), let
alone announce the project to the wide world...)

    David