HAL 0.5.10

[Michael Biebl]

2007/10/15, Danny Kukawka <danny.kukawka at web.de>:
> On Montag, 15. Oktober 2007, Sjoerd Simons wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 14, 2007 at 02:57:49PM +0200, Danny Kukawka wrote:
> [...]
> > > The hal-info package need a HAL >= 0.5.10 due to new fdi-directives
> > > (*_outof) which wouldn't work with older HAL versions. It make no sense
> > > to use this hal-info version with hal =< 0.5.10 since you would lose many
> > > of the fdi-rules.
> >
> > Still having configure doing check for things that only matter at runtime
> > is a bad practise IMHO. A warning instead of abort would be okay. But with
> > the current check, we can't create the hal-info packages without hal, which
> > is quite annoying.
>
> This is nothing new. You couldn't build all features of the package (e.g.
> KillSwitch feature) without HAL before. It make simply no sense to build
> hal-info for systems with older HAL versions. Do you have a build system
> without minimal install which didn't contain HAL?
>

What sjoerd tried to say (and I myself too) is, that it doesn't really
help to add a build time check, as the resulting binary package could
be installed in combination with an incompatible hal version. As most
of the users used precompiled packages (in from of debs or rpms) it
would be better to document such dependencies/conflicts in the NEWS
file so package maintainers can declare the correct dependencies
between the binary packages.

So all in all, the configure check is basically useless for the
majority of users and only interesting for source based distros.

Cheers,
Michael

-- 
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