"HAL is dead, long live DeviceKit"

[23meg]

(Thanks to Martin Pitt for the heads up)

David Zeuthen (of HAL and PolicyKit fame) has announced his plans for and unveiled his initial work on DeviceKit:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ay/011560.html

Looks like he's aiming for at least partial inclusion in GNOME 2.24, which means some exciting changes are ahead for Intrepid, hopefully without big regressions (testers, take note). Perhaps the most directly notable component for non-technical users will be gnome-disk utility (scroll down in the message for screenshot links), which it seems will fulfill the need for a graphical disk manager.

The pre-release code is already available for testing (with the obvious caveat: it will certainly kill all your disks and you'll lose all your data forever). Zeuthen will be at FOSSCamp next week, where I expect he will brief the Ubuntu crew on the upcoming changes and discuss how they can be implemented. There are no official plans yet, but we can probably expect the new goods to land in Intrepid in a month or two.

[FuturePilot]

Wow! Sounds cool. Can't wait to see this.

[atlas95]

Seems to be excellent !
Visual smart monitoring is wonderfull !
I can't wait for see it too !!

[SunnyRabbiera]

well technically its not dead, just being recoded...
but it looks like development is all going to gnome, wonder how KDE and others will cope as they too use HAL and such

[Mr. Picklesworth]

HAL has always felt in need of some kind of refactoring (it has gone crazy too many times for me...), so this is good news

I notice there are user-specified labels in that GNOME disks admin tool, too, which is something that seems oddly difficult in the current situation.

[Andrewie]

KDE doesn't use HAL, they use solid which uses HAL. (if my memory serves me right). They just need to adjust solid to work with DeviceKit and everyone (KDE 4 developers) will be fine.

[DoktorSeven]

I'm just distressed that more and more applications are needing this. I don't have HAL running on my machine -- don't need it, don't want it. I can manage things on my own just fine, thanks. I wish I could get rid of dbus as easily, way too much depends on it for some odd reason.

I can understand why some would want things like this, but I would appreciate it being an option, not a requirement.

[Half-Left]

I'm just distressed that more and more applications are needing this. I don't have HAL running on my machine -- don't need it, don't want it. I can manage things on my own just fine, thanks. I wish I could get rid of dbus as easily, way too much depends on it for some odd reason.

I can understand why some would want things like this, but I would appreciate it being an option, not a requirement.

Thats because new users NEED it, you do realize that one of the reason why linux uptake was slow was because of poor interaction with devices. If you want go use Slackware since mostly they mount their devices manually(even Slackware comes with dbus and HAL now).

HAL is a much needed in linux but it seem like something better is coming to replace it, just like Udev.

[Andrewie]

I'm just distressed that more and more applications are needing this. I don't have HAL running on my machine -- don't need it, don't want it. I can manage things on my own just fine, thanks. I wish I could get rid of dbus as easily, way too much depends on it for some odd reason.

I can understand why some would want things like this, but I would appreciate it being an option, not a requirement.

you're the first person I've ever seen that hates HAL, 2 e-cookies for you. Jokes aside I don't HAL will ever be an requirement at the very most you'll have to compile binaries with out HAL support but for a tech person like you that shouldn't be too hard.

[Mr. Picklesworth]

I wish I could get rid of dbus as easily, way too much depends on it for some odd reason.

ehawaaht?!
That's like saying you wish you could get rid of bash (and all other shells); d-bus is a key part of integration for GUIs on the modern desktop!

If you don't believe me, then play with RSS feed subscription in Epiphany, or read about upcoming changes to gnome-panel. D-bus is not something that could (or should) just be yanked out. In fact, dbus is becoming one of the critical components for Linux platforms.