HAL 0.1 release

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 21:01, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 13:39, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > Anyone else got a take on python vs. XML?
> 
> XML. You want this to be data, not code. Mixing the two causes problems.
> Data is much more well-defined.
> 

Ok - As stated earlier I'm happy to change it to XML; it's not a big
change at all..

But, I don't agree this is data proper, see my earlier post [1]. The
thing is that I still retain one of the goals of HAL should be to
support multiple OS'es with a single .fdi file. 

Not only multiple OS'es, but also multiple distributions, kernels, XFree
versions, glib versions. If OEM's are to ship such files (and we want
them to) they need to support distros installed a few years back.

If we can agree on this goal, then one will (almost) end up creating a
programming language inside XML (turing equivalence and all that). And
uhmm, the XML snippet I gave in [1] just hurt my eyes too much so I
tried my luck on Python.

On the other hand, XML have so many other qualities (my favourite
example being PHB's able to understand the need for structured data ;-),
as pointed out by Joe (in this thread) and Dave (in response to [1])
that it would foolish not to use it.

But, I'm still happy to change it to XML, and I will. And I can probably
make the syntax somewhat nicer than the example given in [1].

> Also I agree the python dependency is undesirable. Really ought to go
> with the zero deps here (especially for the client library; a daemon may
> be able to get away with something like GLib).
> 

True. The lib depends only on dbus (and it will stay that way) and the
daemon will depend on glib, expat and dbus(-glib).

> Of course having wrapper APIs or "bindings" for various dependencies is
> fine, see dbus (and the yes/no/auto --enable-foo setup for each
> dependency foo in the configure script).
> 

That's a different story, but yes python bindings could be nice, if not
just for proof of concept GUI tools.

Oh, and is people cool with me using the .fdi extension? I haven't
checked at all..

Thanks,
David

[1] :
https://listman.redhat.com/archives/xdg-list/2003-September/msg00133.html