HAL 0.1 release

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 01:44, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote:
> I did just installed it (from CVS) and it looks great.
> 
> Only some comments:
> 
> It does not work with ieee1394 devices :-P :
> 

Hi Carlos,

That's right.. it only presently works with USB devices. I should have
mentioned this in the release notes more explicitly.

> got msg!
> message name=org.freedesktop.Hal.agent.DeviceRemoved; sender=:1-3
> string:
> (unknown arg type 12)
> message name=org.freedesktop.Hal.agent.DeviceRemoved; sender=:1-3
> in handleDeviceRemoved

That does looks like my code...

> Segmentation Fault
> 

Yes it's my code ;-).. 

Haven't seen segfaults for a long time though. Was that with a IEEE1394
device? Please post more details in bugzilla.freedesktop.org.

> The "(unknown arg type 12)" appears also with an USB photo camera 
> 

My bad. I nicked the printmsg from dbus and it doesn't do dictionaries.
There is still way too much debug information in hald. Did it segfault
with the USB device as well?

> Also, I don't know where is the gnome_hal_watcher that you talk about
> inside the README.
> 

Oh.. it's not in CVS (and it won't be on freedesktop.org since it's
gnome specific) but there is a tarball on hal.freedesktop.org.

> I will look at the code and I will start the specs proposal merge soon.
> 

Excellent - looking forward to seeing that.

> >  o  Device info files are python scripts. I'm not unhappy to change this
> >     to an XML based format if a lot of people feel strongly about this.
> >     In particular it would be have the opinion of distributors. 
> 
> I think that hal is a core application and some distributions will not
> be happy adding python as a distribution core (I think that FreeBSD were
> changing their core packages to move out perl, I'm not sure, but I think
> that I read that)
>
> The XML based format sounds better for me.
> 

Hmm yes.. when embedding python one actually link statically with
libpython.a. It probably still requires python runtime though.. Haven't
checked. Well, HAL is a freedesktop project so it's prime consumers are
desktop environments and applications, so requiring python may be ok.
But I do see your point..

Anyone else got a take on python vs. XML?

> I could help here, I have some IEEE1394 devices
> 

That would be excellent. AFAICS it should only require changes in
hal_hotplug.c. (which will hopefully be phased out soon in favor of
integration with linux-hotplug)

Many thanks,
David