HAL ideas from mac

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 02:36:23PM -0400, Joe Shaw wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 23:37, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I was looking at a Mac in the store today, and noticed that they have a
> > little tree-structured diagram of all the hardware on the system on 
> > the "Devices and Volumes" tab of the system information app
> 
> They've changed it for Panther, and gotten rid of that structured
> diagram.  All the same info is there though.
> 

It will be possible to do stuff like this with hal as devices now have
an (optional) Parent property. Its actually quite neat as we can show
the same stuff that "lspci -vt" shows on Linux.

It is interesting to see that both Mac and Windows use volumes as
children of storage devices. We probably want the same for hal, e.g.
have volumes appear as "HalDevice" objects even though they are
software only, yes? Such devices would have the capability "StorageVolume"
where their parent is just "Storage".

The internal view could then look like this:

 - ATA controller
   - Storage device (/dev/hda)
     - Volume (/dev/hda1, ext3, mounted at /)
     - Volume (/dev/hda2, swap)
   - Storage device (/dev/hdc, cdrom)
     - Volume (audio)
     - Volume (data)
 - USB host controller
   - USB Hub
     - Storage Device (/dev/sda, removable USB harddisk)
       - Volume (/dev/sda1, vfat, mounted at /mnt/volumes/usbhd1)
       - Volume (/dev/sda2, vfat, mounted at /mnt/volumes/usbhd2)
   - Storage Device (/dev/sdb, Compact Flash reader)
     - Volume (/dev/sdb1, vfat, mounted at /mnt/volumes/cf1)

Of course how GNOME and KDE presents this information is pretty much
up to them. 

It would probably be useful to factor all the volume handling stuff out
into a daemon (using hal objects and dbus interfaces) as Carlos suggested
earlier?

I will put this into the hal spec and publish a new draft version soon.

Thanks,
David

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