Update on DeviceKit

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 14:50 +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> One thing that isn't clear to me after your summary is what happens
> with udev? After all, udev already does (a) and (b), and a subset of
> (c). Would DK entirely replace udev, and would DK take over /dev
> maintenance and mknod'ing? Or does it basically provide a dbusified
> interface to udev, which would be the actual source of device change

Right, on Linux, DeviceKit is just a simple D-Bus-ified front-end to
udev. On other OS'es it may do a lot of other things but the interface
would remain the same (that's actually one reason it's a daemon and not
just a shared library - initially it was just a shared library, check
the git history).

> notifications (as hal is today) and storage of arbitrary properties
> (which would need to be added to udev)?

Actually udev supports storing of arbitrary properties today already; it
has a database. That's why 

 $ devkit --native-path /sys/block/sda

and

 $ udevinfo -q all --path /sys/block/sda

will return exactly the same information.

On Linux, udev will also serves the purpose of probing devices just like
HAL did. In fact, today, both HAL and udev probe the same devices..
which is pretty inefficient.

      David