[PATCH_ES_] New storage methods for partitioning and formatting

[Dan Nicholson]

On 11/18/06, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-11-17 at 22:31 -0500, Doug Goldstein wrote:
>
> >  So now it'll be more complicated by having to wrap a
> > HAL & D-Bus connection then just calling system() with the proper
> > parameters.
>
> Not complicated at all - in fact it's easier. You don't want to know the
> pain that comes of writing a desktop application that calls commands as
> the root user. You get errors handled in a sane way, in a secure and
> easy to audit channel. You write common code once in HAL (which can be
> as complicated as hell) and then you can get a nice simple abstracted
> method for normal desktop use. And you can still use your shell commands
> if you know what you are doing. Win win win.
>
> As a matter of point, I *am* a desktop component developer who finds HAL
> very useful. I can understand your LFS attitude, but this is exactly
> what the fdi files are meant to give you the freedom to change - you can
> stop the cpu-freq addon from launching if you want to set policy
> yourself, and you can prevent the formatting methods by commenting out
> the method launcher code - or not even ship the fdi. If you are triply
> paranoid, you can even remove the permissions on the DBUS connection for
> that interface in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf as they are all
> different for this purpose.

Speaking as someone who's an editor for a couple of the Linux from
Scratch books, I'd say the majority of people support what HAL is
doing and, in fact, are quite excited about it. I can only think of a
handful of people on our lists who weren't interested in HAL or the
exporting of privileged methods to unprivileged users. Even then, they
haven't been opposed to HAL, they just don't want it on _their_
system. And there's nothing stopping people from doing that. Certainly
you wouldn't put HAL on your locked down mail server. But HAL is
helping to crush a lot of barriers that would otherwise keep my
girlfriend from using the desktop system I've got. And that's a very
worthy goal in my eyes.

Keep up the good work, fellas!

--
Dan