FDI Specification Update?

[Eric Butler]

Sorry it took so long for me to reply, been busy with alot of other stuff.

One of the things I've been thinking about is what does the user want to 
see when a device is connected. So far, I'm basically thinking of three 
main different notification types:

- Internal/Ignored devices: This is basically any device that provides 
no direct functionality to the user, like an IDE controller
- Hotplugged devices that do not require user intervention to function: 
This would be something that is plugged in after the computer is booted 
(like a mouse or keyboard) that does not require any configuration to 
function, but the user would still like to see that it was detected 
(http://extremeboredom.net/images/screenshots/hotwire/nonuser.png).
- Other hotpluged devices: This would be anything else, such as a 
webcam, where the device serves no purpose until an application is 
launched. 
(http://extremeboredom.net/images/screenshots/hotwire/newdevice.png)//

This does not have to nessisarally be auto-detected, there's no problem 
if it's specified in the FDI file and then an "unknown" dialog could be 
displayed for other devices (URL), but I think it might be important 
enough to include in the spec (perhaps an entry in info.capabilities?).

There should be a standard way to mark a device as unsupported by the OS 
(info.capabilities = "linux_unsupported" or something like that).

Also, I would like to suggest that FDI files include the device name and 
vendor along with author to make it possible to present a pretty list of 
"supported" devices to the user.

Oh, do we have a planned method to store+retrieve icons for specific 
device types (that perhaps integrates with the nautilus/gnome-vfs work 
that has been going on)?

That's all I can think of right now, I look forward to hearing 
everyone's comments on all this.

 - Eric

David Zeuthen wrote:

>On Sat, 2004-07-17 at 11:02 -0700, Eric Butler wrote:
>  
>
>>Hey,
>>
>>David you once mentioned in #freedesktop that you were working on an 
>>updated spec for the FDI file format, I didn't see any new docs on the 
>>website or in CVS, any updates with this?
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Yeah I've talked about that, but I haven't really worked on updating the
>spec (been writing code instead), but I've just updated the doc/TODO
>document with the items I'd like to see done before 0.3.0 is ready and
>then we can update the hal spec to 0.3.0 [1].
>
> http://freedesktop.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/hal/hal/doc/TODO
>
>Of course, patches to hal-spec/hal-spec.xml is still welcome :-)
>
>  
>
>>I've got a few ideas of things that I think would be good to include, 
>>but I would first like to see what you are thinking of.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>That sounds interesting; I see no harm in discussing this on this
>mailing list right away.
>
>Cheers,
>David
>
>[1]: And when that's done I will do a better job of keeping the spec in
>sync with the code.
>
>  
>
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