HAL: camera

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 03:53, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> According to the HAL spec, the 'camera' capability is for still-image
> cameras.  Shouldn't it perhaps be that 'camera' is for any kind of
> digital camera, and have the capabilities 'camera.image', 'camera.audio'
> and 'camera.movie', or something of that nature?  Even many still-image
> cameras these days also support movies.  'camera' doesn't just mean
> still images, and it's likely apps will want to differentiate between
> still image, video, and mixed-mode cameras.

You're right on track.

The latest thinking [1] is also that a volume with a DCIM tree at the
root (or more precisely: satisfying the DCF spec) should export the
capability camera (though the category would still be volume so a
desktop file manager can show the appropriate icon). Doing this for
volumes, however, is outside the scope of HAL and will be the
responsibility of a desktop policy engine such as gnome-volume-manager.

I suppose that Chris (who is looking into integrating HAL and gphoto)
will come up with appropriate properties we can put in the spec and that
HAL and desktop policy engines can follow.

The corresponding case is already in place for optical drives, e.g. we
have storage.[cdrw,dvd,dvdr,dvdram] properties and capabilities. For
every capability we 'invent' it's worth considering such a split.

Cheers,
David

[1] : http://primates.ximian.com/~rml/blog/archives/000313.html