hal-info: making hardware updates easier

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 00:52 +0000, Martin Owens wrote:
> Way to duplicate effort, I've been telling you guys about
> dohickey.sourceforge.net for a long time now which includes a perfect
> medium of updating hardware information. ok so it'll also contain
> information about hardware that isn't useful to drive it; but it will
> contain information that hal will find useful. it even has model
> switching because more information is available about detected
> hardware presenting better choices to users.
> 
> hal-info looks promising but it's still stunted and heavily in favour
> of developer contributed information.

Yep, I'm intending to write a blog (or a wiki page) on how to update fdi
files and then how to send a patch upstream. And for something that's
only existed a little while, I expect it to be stunted ;-) 

> how will a user keep up to date information?
> how will a user correct mistakes?

Users don't correct mistakes, power users and developers do. I always
imagine my girlfriend. XML is just another three letters of the
alphabet.

> how is administration done on submitted data?

We ask the user who submitted the data. Most of the time this comes from
distribution maintainers who get the information from user bugzillas.

> how do you keep your types structure up to date?

What's a "types structure", sorry?

> I could do with some help myself to be honest and we could come up
> with a solution which is better than both projects because we both
> have good points of view (and quite a bit of enthusiasm).

Yes, more help would be great. hal-info is just about updated hardware
descriptions and not a general hardware thing like dohickey.

Richard.