General questions about HAL

[Artem Kachitchkine]

> removable devices. One typical scenario:

That is precisely the kind of scenario that Project Utopia 
(http://kerneltrap.org/node/3450) targets to eliminate. HAL, D-BUS and 
desktop volume/device managers are technical parts of the general 
solution to the end-user problems that Utopia is solving.

Again, HAL is just one part, although an important one. And again, it's 
a technical detail - end users are not supposed to notice or even know 
about HAL, otherwise it wouldn't be "transparent" handling, would it :) 
That's the goal, anyway.

> So, first things first, a general question about HAL. Is it possible to achieve
> transparent handling of removable devices with HAL? E. g. plug in a usb stick,
> thing gets mounted under /mnt/usbstick, for example. Plug in a usb mass storage
> camera, thing gets mounted under /mnt/camera and doesn't interfere with the usb
> stick.

That's pretty much what happens today on Linux distros that ship with HAL.

> I reckon building HAL on Slackware is quite a hassle, but I'm ready to undergo
> quite some of that just to achieve something like I described. Documentation on
> the web is unfortunately rather sparse, so I decided to subscribe to this
> list... hope I'm not in the wrong place.

You can start with:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fHalBuildInstructions

Prerequisites are listed there.

> Other general question: if HAL applies as a candidate for what I want it to do,
> how stable (e. g. production-ready) is it?

As its version spec implies - 0.5.7 - it is still in development. But 
it's been part of the mainstream for quite some time, and both GNOME and 
KDE decided to rely on HAL for "plug and play" in the future.

-Artem.