Re: [gentoo-user] Another angle on hal/xorg thread

[Jesús Guerrero]

On Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:25:49 -0500, Mike Edenfield <kutulu@××××××.org>
wrote:
> On 11/4/2009 10:51 AM, Harry Putnam wrote:
>> I didn't want to derail the ongoing thread about hal/xorg with this
>> question there.
>>
>> Far as I remember I haven't done anything special concerning hal but
>> at some point hal disappeared.  And is not on my system anymore.
>
> I believe that some packages in portage recently masked off the "hal"
> USE flag (GNOME stuff, maybe?), so if those were the only packages
> relying on hal it might have gone away.
>
>> I've always used and /etc/X11/xorg.conf file for starting X.
>> What I'm wondering from seeing this kind of topic frequently here is
>> if I'm running in some deprecated mode?
>>
>> If my setup using no hal, and xorg.conf is going to become outdated
>> and stop working anytime soon?
>
> The answer is a solid "who the heck knows".
>
> If it works for you now, don't mess with it.  Wait for the
> Xorg/hal/devkit/whatever situation to settle down before you go making
> any drastic changes.

I'd just save all the config files for future reference, specially if you
are going to keep your hardware for a long time. For the rest, use whatever
works for you right now. I remind you also of quickpkg, in case you need to
test and revert packages quickly.

> Some people, like myself, are running X with hal and no .conf file and
> it works like a champ.  I get better hardware detection with hal,
> especially on my laptop, than I ever got manually.
>
> Other people have had problems with hal and Xorg not detecting their
> hardware at all.  What you are "frequently" seeing is those people
> reminding everyone, every time the topic come up, that you don't *need*
> to use the new hal-ified way if it doesn't work for you.

This whole hal stuff has always been a mess. Yes, it works for a few
persons out of the box. But for those that don't, it has brought a lot of
trouble. I've never suggested anyone ditching hal when it worked for him or
her. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But I can't help but to think that
I've never liked hal because it's a monsters that doesn't solve the
problems that it was created to solve, except in a few cases out of pure
chance. I still don't know what's so amazing about the hal automounting
stuff, when a simple udev rule can do exactly the same without tainting all
my software. Now hal has proven to be what a lot of people knew it was from
the beginning, just think of the lot of wasted hours, and the other lot
that will be wasted to remove all the metastases on every single program it
has touched with its tentacles. Hopefully a big part of it would be a
conversion rather than a complete rewrite.

However, I am sure that they've learn from the experience, and that's a
good thing, it's useless to talk now about *what* could have been done and
*how*, we have to look forward, everyone including those that just like me
do not like hal. It's the kind of thing that happens when we integrate
non-mature technologies into every single product under the sun: if they
succeed they are visionaries. If they don't, then everyone complains, human
nature I guess. :) 
-- 
Jesús Guerrero