[Libburn] Re: Cancelling an ongoing burn. Is this dangerous ?

[Dana Jansens]

On 2/9/06, Derek Foreman <manmower at signalmarketing.com> wrote:
> location is a unique identifier, yes.  And it's a 1:1 mapping.
>
> I'm wondering if we should give location a bit of a promotion...
>
> We could have a function to open a drive by location.  The location could
> be one of those HAL unique device identifiers, or it could be a /dev/sg*
> or /dev/hd*.  Then we can have legacy /dev names and some new ID system
> through the same interface.
>
> (further, we could pass an array of these things to libburn to get our
> drive info array?)
>
> Any comments?
>
> Is this even what HAL is for? :)

"Traditionally, desktop applications discovered hardware by talking
directly to the operating system kernel (the kernel maintains the list
of devices attached to the system). This is a tedious process and is
not exact because sometimes the kernel doesn't know everything about a
device. For example, some digital cameras and portable music players
show up as just another hard disk in the user interface. Thus, not
many user interfaces have been built for hardware discovery.

"At a first glance, there appears to be a one-to-one correspondence
between the device objects in the kernel and the device objects in the
HAL daemon. One main difference, however, is that the device objects
in the daemon contain a lot more information than what the kernel
knows."

In theory it could give us more information about a drive, like known
bugs. "This drive can't do DAO even though it says it can" and such.

Is that up to us to parse or should we leave that up to the frontend
though? I'm starting ot think maybe we shouldn't be touching libhal at
all...

> > Elsewise my wish to directly address a drive would be
> > equivalent to the wish to define a query in the HAL database
> > which exactly yields one item as result.
> > If the libburn API offers such a query, i would use that.
>
> I think the front end would be responsible for dealing with the HAL
> database...

Yeah, it would choose a drive through HAL + user input and pass us
something. Is there any advantage to sending us a HAL ID as opposed to
the dev node listed by HAL? Network burners? Is it possible to have a
burner without a dev node, and to use it? Is there any good reason for
us to know when a USB burner gets unplugged? Can we tell if it got
unplugged during use already?

Dana