HAL and OSSv4 support

[Dirk R. Gently]

Hello, hal devs.  Thank you for the work you do in the community.  You
efforts are definitely appreciated.

I am writing because I have a question about HAL getting OSSv4 support.  I
am a KDE 4 user and because KDE 4 uses HAL almost exclusively there are a
good number of KDE 4 applications that can't use OSSv4.  Currently HAL does
not have support for OSSv4 and from the research I gathered this is because
OSSv4 doesn't have support for sysfs and udev.  Danny Kukawka's comment on
the HAL mailing list looks to sum it up:

... I taked a look at the source and it looks to me as if there is no sysfs
> or udev support in this package. IMO we shouldn't add without these
> essential issues support to HAL for it...
>

source <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2008-March/011061.html>

I'm new to this so please forgive my ignorance but I wasn't aware that HAL
has new standards the require drivers to support sysfs and udev.  I thought
HAL could still implement devices with the need for them.  Am I off on
this?  Could there be?

There doesn't seem to be any regular communication from OSS to the HAL
mailing list so I decided just to ask the OSS developers why HAL
functionality hasn't beed added:

apriori at dkc-clan.de said:

...About sysfs and udev. I doubt OSSv4 will ever support the later, because
> it doesn't want to focus on one Unix type, namely Linux here. It's trying to
> between the unices, working on most of them without implicitly concentrating
> on one therefore rejecting any specific technology not strictly tied to the
> kernel. Supporting sysfs though is a minor task and shouldn't be too hard to
> implement....
>

and hannu at opensound.com said:

OSS4 doesn't use sysfs or any other Linux only mechanisms. Instead there is
> an ioctl() interface that works under all operating systems. It's OK if
> somebody creates a sysfs interface for OSS. However I don't see it
> necessary.
>
> The idea is simple. The application opens /dev/sndstat and calls
> SNDCTL_SYSINFO (http://manuals.opensound.com/developer/SNDCTL_SYSINFO.html).
> This call returns the number of audio and mixer devices in the system. Then
> SNDCTL_MIXERINFO and SNDCTL_AUDIOINFO can be used to obtain info about the
> actual audio and mixer devices.
>

I use OSSv4 for several applications and support for OSSv4 would be very
very helpful.  Could something be done to get OSSv4 support into HAL?  Thank
you for taking the time to read this and any thoughts would be appreciated.

-- 
Gen2ly - http://linuxtidbits.wordpress.com/
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