The Rot

[Martin Owens]

Greetings All;

Following the recent icons thread I feel compelled to ask the list
about the direction that HAL is taking. every month I see new things
being added to HAL that have no baring on providing standard hardware
interfaces and is moving slowly but surly into the realms of providing
user information and lots of other indisputably useful features which
may be clouding the HAL development direction.

As I see it there are the following functional features which would be
more useful if thought about separately:

 1) To provide a standard way to interface with hardware classes
through standard methods (HAL, CUPS/gp, Sane)
 2) To provide dbus messaging for hardware detection and identification (HAL)
 3) To attach to the identified hardware pertinent information for
operational performance and usability (HAL)
 4) To attach to the identified hardware trivial user information for
user query and visibility (HAL?, Dohickey)
 5) To aid the software selection and soft-plugging of passive ports
(Serial, Parallel, Monitor etc) including probing and detection (None
built to any degree of quality)

If you can identify more single functions do let me know.

So what we have is a number of projects all rolled into one; yes dbus
is quite cool. yes fdi files are very useful for keeping information;
but do we really want to keep things like 'names', descriptions,
pictures, icons and the like in fdi files which are loaded when the
computer boots and loads hald? it seems keeping the fdi files small
and well managed may well be a good way to keep hals performance lean
and keep the project on some sort of track.

The idea that occurs to me at this juncture is that 1 and 2 above are
innate, that is to say they are required regardless of the kind of
device and can provide extensions to other things; 3 can be such an
extension with a method which returns pertinent information to drivers
and clients alike; 4 and 5 can also be operated as extensions with
methods specifically aimed towards getting trivial hardware
information and getting/setting passive port status/hardware
identification. this would at least have the effect of keeping all the
features we all want in a nice clean way without complicating the HAL
project.

Please do tell me if I'm talking out of my arse though, it has been known.

Best Regards, Martin Owens