HAL Starting before udev (WAS: Re: [PATCH] remove usage of g_assert() in blockdev)

[David Zeuthen]

Steev Klimaszewski wrote:
> (Note: Personally, I am not against PAM, but there are a lot of people 
> in Gentoo-land who are very unhappy with the fact that HAL is going to 
> require PolicyKit with its next release, 

Yes, I've been unclear about that. PolicyKit support will be optional 
but still strongly discouraged.

which still hasn't even seen a
> release at all... same with the hal-info.)

What's the problem with hal-info? It's just organizing files in 
different tarballs; if you just make your 'hal' package include from 
'hal' and 'hal-info' tarballs it will make zero difference.

> While I am not against snapshots, It would be the fact that every distro 
> out there will be testing against various different checkouts.  I know 
> that PolicyKit hasn't had any changes at all in quite a while - any 
> chance of a release sometime soon?

I've just been busy with lots and lots of other work here at Red Hat. 
Will be before Dec 15 because that is when the next HAL release is out, 
for better or worse.

> I pointed Roy (the baselayout maintainer for Gentoo) to this thread, and 
> he was displeased to say the least.  I am trying to get him to write an 
> email and explain the objections that he has to HAL being started before 
> udev - though, I guess, my wondering is on a couple of different levels.

Sure, I'm not totally against discussing distro details on this list. 
Perhaps if you can gently nudge one of your other fellow Gentoo 
developers into being more polite perhaps we can avoid a silly flamewar 
for what is basically a misunderstanding.

> Gentoo we have dependencies in our init scripts, so for example, 
> currently, since HAL doesn't work properly without dbus, it's init 
> script has something along the lines of
> 
> depends() {
>     after dbus
> }
> 
> So to move HAL before udev for us, requires re-working that.

You will still be able to start HAL after udev has started even when we 
have done work to put in a feature so HAL / udev can be started in 
tandem. Because, without this it would be difficult to do development 
work on HAL at all.

Anyway, none of this work is done at all, someone will need to do it 
before it happens.

      David