hal draft spec

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, 2003-09-09 at 17:47, David Zeuthen wrote:
> 
> I'm a first-time poster to OSS lists. If this is the wrong list, I
> apologize. 
> 
> I also apologize, in advance, for this long mail...

It's the right list, and a good mail, so no apologies required.

> I'm prepared to work on it (disclaimer: I can only work on it in my
> spare time). How should we proceed?

I think your mail looks like it's very much on the right track, fwiw.
I'd suggest that we create an account for you on freedesktop.org and you
can start working in CVS and maybe set up a download/information web
page. A dedicated mailing list might be smart, too, but you're welcome
to use this one for now. May take a little more time than usual to get
things set up since we're in a server migration.

In any case, if you want send me an ssh v2 public key (ssh-keygen, send
id_dsa.pub) and a preferred login name and I'll create an account.

Once you have a place to work it's really just a matter of making the
code run, and collecting as much feedback/info as you can from potential
library users - GNOME/KDE people, distribution people, whoever - I find
that can be crucial to getting a library accepted, since it's hard to
anticipate a priori which issues will be important to someone.
I guess a proof of concept demo showing the desktop nicely handling a
USB device would do a lot to sell the library as well. ;-) Maybe someone
will even volunteer to help out with the desktop bits.

I'm very happy to see someone interested in working on this, as you
might have guessed. ;-) But I hope other people are interested too.

Havoc