Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale

[Neil Bothwick]

On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:59:07 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:

> Most devices fall into one of two groups: storage and I/O.
> Auto-mounters do not care about your keyboard, whereas X needs to know
> about your monitor, card, keyboard, mouse. Why does hal try and
> abstract both? Seems silly to me.

On the other hand, having a single method of configuring such things does
give consistency, and means you have to learn only one syntax, but see
below. You cannot totally separate the two areas, for example a keylogger
may need access to both I/O and storage, so a central, separate resource
used by all software is more in keeping with the Unix way than each
program including its own implementation.

> One could also argue that the developer's state of mind is reflected in
> the chosen method of configuration - xml files. This just defies all
> understanding. Apart from the fact that real-world xml is almost
> unreadable, the conditions that make xml useful are simply not present
> in hal...

I couldn't agree more. XML was very fashionable a few years ago, maybe
this influenced the developer. Hell, I was even guilty of using it
myself :( As an alternative to binary configuration files, XML is a step
in the right direction, but it should not be used where users are
expected to edit the files. In some ways, the worth or otherwise of HAL,
from a user perspective, has been largely obscured by the difficulty in
reading, let alone editing, its configuration files.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

I am MODERATOR of BORG. Follow the rules or be assimilated.