hal: Branch 'master'

Richard Hughes hughsient at kemper.freedesktop.org
Fri Dec 22 11:23:03 PST 2006


 HACKING |   38 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 NEWS    |    1 +
 2 files changed, 39 insertions(+)

New commits:
diff-tree 71b2a0b15a55d4d8f2739297b9998f721053bff4 (from f33ffb6cb819b5f263a2742e5422532cf01f979d)
Author: Richard Hughes <richard at hughsie.com>
Date:   Fri Dec 22 19:22:40 2006 +0000

    add info about hal-info to HACKING and add dependency to NEWS
    
    Add information about hal-info to HACKING and add the new dependency
    to NEWS.

diff --git a/HACKING b/HACKING
index 3be1b90..7e9bb5b 100644
--- a/HACKING
+++ b/HACKING
@@ -1,3 +1,41 @@
+hal-info
+===
+
+The information FDI scripts have been moved to a subpackage called hal-info.
+
+Q: What is it?
+A: hal-info is just a small hal package that provides hardware data and quirks.
+   These quirks are currently things like what mice support reporting battery
+   status, what music players are supported and what cameras are detected.
+   This could also include a list of display adaptors that need resuming
+   or a list of broken batteries that might explode.
+
+Q: Why split the information data from the main tarball?
+A: Well, policy and probing information is still in the daemon package where
+   they belong. Hal is released every few months with updated
+   dependencies and lots of snazzy new features.
+   Users love this, stable distributions hate it, and don't update HAL,
+   missing the newest hardware quirk updates. This means that new hardware
+   often won't work out of the box until the next version of the distro
+   is released.
+
+So, for example, stable distro 'x' ships HAL 0.5.9 with no intention
+of updating it other than for security fixes. Stable distro 'x'
+does however update from hal-info-20061107 to hal-info-{date} as there
+are no new features, minimal risk of breaking, and lots of chance that
+more hardware that didn't work now will.
+
+What does this mean for:
+
+ * An end user: Not much - all the fdi files are installed in the
+   same places as they used to be.
+ * A distro packager: hal should depend on hal-info, of any version.
+   Existing patches to the fdi files in fdi/information should be moved
+   to the hal-info product.
+ * Release architect: updating hal-info shouldn't break anything
+   that already works or add new dependencies.
+ * Developer: hal-info should be checked out in the same level
+   directory as hal if you intend to use ./run-hald.sh
 
 SCM
 ===
diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 062928e..6c22799 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@ Requirements for HAL 0.5.9 ""
  - dbus             >= 0.60      (with glib bindings)
  - glib             >= 2.6.0
  - expat            >= 1.95.8
+ - hal-info         >= 20061114
  - libusb           >= 0 0.1.10a (optional)
  - pciutils         >= 2.2.3     (optional
  - dmidecode        >= 2.7       (optional)


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