http://advogato.org/person/Marcus/

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 23:19 +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: 
> 	At work ... after talking to some HAL knowledgeable
> 	guys I found out I need to change my SUSE libgphoto2
> 	package to use HAL better.
> 
> 	Then I found out that HAL has this evil libgphoto2
> 	usermap to FDI converter. WTF? Those guys never even
> 	said a single word to the gphoto developers that they
> 	need the map in this format, they just went and wrote
> 	a script? Another example of NIH syndrome... :/
> 
> 	So I now just added a FDI map output to
> 	print-usb-usermap, the program we have for dumping such
> 	maps and have it work the canonical and correct way.
> 
> 	Things i hated today: hal.

I don't know; there's certainly been discussion on at least this list
(and some libgphoto2 guys are here) about how to teach hal about USB
cameras supported by libgphoto2 so we can notify the desktop as
appropriate. What we do in Fedora for hal 0.5.x is to patch the
libgphoto2 SRPM to generate the XML file used by hal, see here

 http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/rpms/gphoto2/devel/gphoto2.spec?view=markup

It's not rocket science really.

I don't really know why this is a big deal but I guess I should have put
more effort into asking this to be applied upstream in libgphoto2 - I'll
make sure to do that soon!

Ideally I'd also like libgphoto2 to carry the device information files
saying that this or that USB Storage Device is actually a camera, not
just a hard disk - maybe this makes sense now that Hubert added mass
storage support to libgphoto2? I've seen at least XML files with this
data so we should just use it...

Btw, another thing is that the usb usermap currently provided by
libghoto2 and used by the kernel are probably going away in at least
some distros (Fedora and also SUSE I think) as they move away from the
shell-script horror that is linux-hotplug :-)

Cheers,
David


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