You probably know that I’m a fierce antagonist of anything that isn’t simple, that is over engineered or that is plainly ugly.
Now I’ll spend some lines of this rant^Wlog writing about how HAL is annoying, conceptually broken and ill conceived.
You may start thinking about other technologies that now are maturing in something nicer like dbus (even if could be lighter and faster) or udev, they improved a lot even if I would avoid force feeding ingenuous lambs (I mean people using linux and posix systems before and not yesterday windows converted users that really NEEDED that stuff NOW and that now appear to be the main target for opensource applications nowadays, see David’s post)
) with them.
Now, udev is good at reacting to hw events and dbus is good at passing messages, why something that should be just a little layer of glue between them has to be that complex?
Why it needs to have lots of square wheels reinvented, while we have perfectly round ones available for free?
Cardoe already voiced his frustration about it and I’m plainly not using it while I can, still I’d like to have something lighter, simpler, saner to notify userspace applications that something in the hardware changed, since the idea isn’t that stupid.
Sorry if I answer to a somewhat old post
I absolutely concur with your point of view.
HAL is complicated and not really useful, it’s a brain-dead back step.
A good bunch of udev’s rules could maybe be used without any difficulty to provide most of hal functions (e.g. mounting); the remaining ones maybe doesn’t serve …
P.S. An example I’ve noticed is the custom configuration for Xorg’s keyboard and mouse with hal: it’s such a mess and plain ugly.
xorg.conf’s input devices section was indeed simple in comparison to un-explicable xml in
/etc/hal/fdi/policy.