HAL, and laptop Fn and hardware keys

[Matthias Grimm]

On Wed, 21 Sep 2005 10:44:04 -0400
David Zeuthen <david at fubar.dk> wrote:

Hi,

> Why on earth would I want Yet Another Daemon.. from Yet Another
> Project... running for something as trivial as keys, when we got HAL and
> it fits perfectly in with the model we use for other devices? Care to
> explain why it's a bad idea to port this to HAL? 

I followed this discussing with interest but the longer I read the
bolder a question popped up in my mind:
            Why need HALd to handle key events at all? 

There is already a very good abstraction of keys in Linux: The kernel
input event layer with the keycodes in linux/input.h. This keys could
also be used in X and contains already a lot of special keys.

For example there are:
  KEY_BRIGHTNESSUP
  KEY VOLUMEDOWN
  KEY_POWER
  KEY_CLOSECD
  KEY_EJECTCD
  KEY_EJECTCLOSECD
  KEY_NEXTSONG
  KEY_PLAYPAUSE
  KEY_PREVIOUSSONG
  KEY_STOPCD
  etc.

Why are you trying to establish a new dbus based key event system
instead of extending the existing one? Why would you like to shoulder
this extra load?

Distributing key events via the kernel input layer has another
important advantage: It will support all applications with or without
dbus support.

  Best Regards
   Matthias