HAL, and laptop Fn and hardware keys

[Richard Hughes]

On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 11:51 +0200, Danny Kukawka wrote:
> On Wednesday 21 September 2005 11:27, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > Yes, the code looks good, but:
> >
> > http://developer.berlios.de/project/stats/?group_id=2321
> >
> > I'm not sure that it's seen much heavy testing...
> 
> I would say: with more than 200.000 downloads of openSUSE 10.0 RC1 (only at 
> ftp.gwdg.de) this is heavy tested.

OOps. Sorry. My mistake. Is it on by default in openSUSE? How come there
are not more backends available?

> > Plus it only seems to support toshiba laptops, linux input events, and
> > acpi events. The other special buttons look completely unsupported.
> 
> But you can extend the IAL easy with a new module. I think each new module 	
> would be appreciated. And why reinvent the wheel?

Well, it would probably be accepted better in other distros, and in the
existing infrastructure. For me, adding another ButtonPressed event in
GNOME Power Manager is a two second job (as it already uses libhal), as
it would be in any userspace application. Convincing the user that they
need to install *another* init.d daemon just to poll for a few keys that
no-one hardly ever uses is a bit of a toughy - on the other hand,
modifying an existing addon that is sleeping 99.9% of the time, that
does not contribute significantly to bootup time is an easy win. 

Most of the toshiba code (a couple of key functions) can be
copied/pasted from ial and fnfx, and I'm sure with the first module in
place, people can quite easily contribute the required data to "get
their laptop working"

I don't want to come across as a git, and I'm sure ial is very capable,
but I think the functionality belongs in HAL.

Richard.