Update on DeviceKit

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 11:15 -0400, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
> >  - Too abstract / generic
> >    - probably too tied to Linux
> 
> This is very true.  It's good that portability is a concern for this.

[...]

> It looks like you've made DK even less portable, though.  There doesn't
> seem to be any infrastructure for modular OS support.  The main
> devkit-daemon.c is littered with Linux-only assumptions.  At least in
> hal, there were OS directories, and stubs for implementing new OS
> support.  What is one supported to do here, #ifdef the code?

[...]

> What are specific your plans to add non-Linux support?  How easy is it
> going to be to leverage the work that has already gone into hal for,
> say, FreeBSD support?  I'll admit, it's very difficult currently being
> the only one maintaining the FreeBSD port.  Making the transition as
> painless as possible would be a big help for me.

I've mentioned in the TODO lists that the Linux specific bits will be
factored out into individual files as much as possible and #ifdef's for
the rest. I expect, when this is done, it'll be very easy to figure out
where to put OS specific bits. I also expect you can reuse a lot of the
code from the FreeBSD HAL backend.

Portability is definitely something I want to ensure is working from the
get-go so I'm glad to see you reply early on. From a pragmatic point of
view there's probably going to need to be some ping-pong back and forth
until the code is in a state where it's easy to port to other OS'es than
Linux 2.6.

Also, keep in mind this is not really a release and the code is still in
flux; I mainly sent out this mail to ensure that everyone is in the loop
and to get feedback about the architecture / design / scope. So in a
sense, right now I'm more asking for feedback about the D-Bus interfaces
than actual code that is out there.

     David