formatting/partitioning methods in HAL

[David Zeuthen]

On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 00:48 -0500, Christopher Santero wrote:
> I'm interested in implementing the formatting and parititioning
> methods David talks about in this Gnome bug:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309067
> 
> I'm new to HAL and DBUS so I'm trying to figure out what I'd need to
> do to get started with this. Using formatting as an example, so far
> I've figured out the following:
> 
> 1. In libhal-storage I have to create a method of LibHalVolume called
> libhal_volume_format (LibHalVolume *volume, const char *fs_type, const
> char *label)

Oh, this I would wait with. We don't even have this for Mount() yet so
just use the dbus_message_new_method_call directly from your program.
When we're super sure about the interface we can add the convenience
functions in libhal-storage (that's all they are - convenience).

> assuming those are the parameters we want for that. This should use
> dbus_message_new_method_call to invoke Format with an interface of
> org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.

Suggest to use org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.Unstable for the time
being (also D-BUS needs a fix to lock down methods on a finer scale than
just interfaces). 

So.. I think this is OK (and the road ahead) as we want to mark this
interface / functionality as unstable as it will definitely evolve over
time and not be fully cooked before in a few months. This way you can
also have your code in the HAL tree without annoying too many people :-)

> 2. In fdi/policy/10osvendor/20-storage-methods.fdi I match devices
> where the key info.capabilities contains "volume" and add the Format
> method in there, with a signature of ss and an execpath of
> hal-system-storage-format.
> 3. Then I create a script in tools/hal-system-storage-format which
> does actual stuff.
> 
> Does that sound correct, and am I missing anything?

Sounds about right - thanks for looking into this!

Oh, at some point we also want PartitionDisk() method on drives but that
can wait until the Format() is hashed out.

Cheers,
David