On recognizing music players in hal/hal-info

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 18:11 -0800, Artem Kachitchkine wrote:
> >> I don't think this would work, because then any USB stick of USB-HD would get 
> >> detected as musicplayer because there are mp3 files. 
> > 
> > If the volume only contains MP3 files, then I guess opening the music
> > player on it might not be considered totally wrong, but yeah, it just
> > errs on the other side then.
> 
> I think what we have today is pretty good, but it would be even better 
> if users were be able to point their mouse at a device and say: this is 
> a music player. Manually editing xml is so last century.

Right. 

Ideally all the user should do is go into something like
gnome-device-manager, change the type of the disk to "Music Player", set
the formats and click apply (maybe after a PolicyKit confirmation
dialog). Then we'd write to the (yet non-existant) persistent database.
The cool thing about this is that we can write a small program that
pulls keys manually set out of this database for sending things
upstream. A pattern like this would also apply to other kinds of
devices.

Of course right now we don't have a persistent database; that's one of
the reasons I want to talk about major changes in HAL (as I said earlier
on the list today).

     David