Scope and Using devices

[Joe Shaw]

> I think Owen has another good point in that IP is software. And if we
> start putting all sorts of software properties onto devices it smells
> like policy.

Smells kind of fishy to me... I mean, I guess it's *technically*
software, but it's something I usually consider a property of the
hardware.

(FWIW, I see issues in setting the IP address as far as conflicting with
things like DHCP or ZeroConf, but really those issues aren't any
different from any application which would otherwise set the IP address
on its own.)

> Well, HAL shouldn't care about sound,volume since that really a software
> thing. 

I guess.  This is another thing I associate more with hardware than with
software.

> 1. What kind of properties should HAL expose. I say, let's keep to
> hardware and the configuration of hardware. And thus I argue that
> scanning for wireless networking is actually in the realm of hardware
> configuration. Thus we should really provide a way to change that. Same
> with volume labels. It's the right thing to do.

Yeah, I see where you're coming from, but today as an application
developer there's not really any difference between getting the ESSID
and getting the IP address.  In both cases you open a socket and issue
an ioctl() on it.  Why provide that information in some cases and not
others?  I suspect it's similar for both volume labels and the volume on
the sound card.

> 2. Whether the properties should be set via SetProperty or via an API. I
> have argued for the latter but do note I'm cool with the former. I just
> see some issues doing that.

Yeah, same here, but the other way around. :)

Last night I started down the path of the SetProperty way just to see
how feasible and easy it'd be.  Maybe I'll finish it up and post a patch
so people can play around with it.

> Which is kind of moot as I replied as we want to freeze the interfaces
> at some point. HAL lives very low down in the stack so ABI/API stability
> will be insanely important.

Agreed.

Joe


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