improving digital camera detection

[David Zeuthen]

On Sat, 2005-01-15 at 15:21 +0100, Pozsar Balazs wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I was playing around with hal+gnome-volume-manager+gthumb, and I found 
> the file /usr/share/hal/fdi/20freedesktop/sony_dsc.fdi, which I think, 
> could be highly improved.
> 
> In the end, I created three new .fdi file which I think worth applying 
> into the default hal config.
> 
> ptp.fdi:
>   If an USB device's interface indicates that it is an PTP device, then 
>   it is a camera.
> 

Yeah, but the question is really if gphoto2 supports it I guess.

Either way I guess it's sane to merge this property as the user will 
learn from his digital camera app that it's unsupported (e.g. I think
this is better than the UI just saying "unknown device").

> massstorage.fdi:
>   This is a trickier one. If the USB device's interface indicates it is 
>   a Mass Storage device, then we set the camera.access_method key to 
>   "storage", BUT we do not set the info.capabilities or info.category.
>   This way, if the device is marked as a camera somewhere else, it will 
>   have the proper camera.access_method key/value pair.
> 

This actually looks pretty clever; how about testing that the 
property camera.access_method exists before setting it to
storage?

> libgphoto2.fdi
>   This is a bit ugly.
>   Basically, it is a collection of the usb id's of various digital 
>   cameras known by libghoto-2.1.5. (It is though a much better start, 
>   than the single sony_dsc.fdi...)
>   I have created the file using a little script, which I have also 
>   encapsulated in the xml as a comment for later reference, so it won't 
>   get lost.
> 

I think we should have a file like this but it should be supplied
libgphoto2, yes? As others have pointed out, it's pretty 
straightforward to patch gphoto2 to give us such a file as
it's pretty much the same as /etc/hotplug/usb.usermap or
whatever it's called on a distribution. How about doing a patch
for gphoto2 to generate this?

Reason is that I don't think it's wise to have this information
in both HAL and gphoto2.

Thanks,
David


_______________________________________________
hal mailing list
hal at lists.freedesktop.org
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/hal