hal 0.5.0 "The family had a lot of buffers." release

[David Zeuthen]

Hey,

I've just released hal 0.5.0 - it's may be a bit rough around the edges
and there are some things like .fdi files for cameras that I need to put
in (the patch is *still* on this mailing list, sorry). Apart from these
disclaimers it seems to work pretty well for me and a few other guys
with the rest of the software updated to using this version hal, e.g.
GNOME VFS, nautilus-cd- burner, gnome-volume-manager, egg-cups and so
forth.

Expect at least a few more releases over the next month to address
possible defects now that this version will be exposed to a larger
testing audience (I'll be putting it in Fedora's development branch
shortly).

URL

 http://freedesktop.org/~david/dist/hal-0.5.0.tar.gz

High-level list of changes since hal 0.4.x:

 - Completely rewritten backend code including splitting work that
   requires privileges into separate processes
 - HAL daemon should be more resistant to broken kernel drivers thanks
   to the split into multiple processes
 - Test suite
 - New features
   - String list property type
   - New device information file features
   - ACPI/PMU/APM/hiddev UPS abstractions
 - Not backwards compatible since D-BUS broke ABI (porting effort is
   minimal though)
 - Updated list of TODO items providing a roadmap

Requires

 - Linux 2.6.10 or later built with hotplug and uevents
 - udev 050 or later with /sbin/udevsend as the hotplug helper/
   multiplexer
 - D-BUS 0.31 or later including glib and (optionally) Python bindings
 - glib2 2.4 or later

Next steps

I'm not sure we need to branch off a stable 0.6.x branch - most of the
missing work (see doc/TODO) should fit in nicely without breaking
anything and the architecture is a lot more extensible. I don't think,
however, it'll take much work to get 0.5.x as stable as 0.4.x - my gut
feeling is that it is already now more stable, but that could just be
me :-)

Of course, if D-BUS changes again, or anything else drastic happens, we
can always just make a branch.

Cheerio,
David


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