Re: Next stop Utopia, full steam ahead?

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 21:24, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Hi all,
> 

Hi,

> So, I'm interested to find out what the status of the Project Utopia stack
> is in relation to GNOME 2.8:
> 
>   * Will any of the Utopia high-level components (such as volume-manager) be
>     proposed for inclusion in 2.8?
> 
>   * Should GNOME Desktop or Platform modules depend on Utopia system or
>     library components (such as hal, d-bus)?
>
>   * Should/will any of the Utopia system or library components be propsed
>     for inclusion in GNOME? (Desktop to start, Platform later.)
> 
>   * What do we have to consider in terms of portability, in the 2.8 time
>     frame? (Will Utopia features just not appear? Should they be hard
>     dependencies? Should we have fallbacks? etc.)
> 
> I don't want to go too far down the path of setting expectations and/or
> feature goals, but it would be great to know where we might be headed early
> on in the release - particularly as the Utopia stuff is firmly lodged
> between the cheeks of the desktop and the bowels of the operating system. :)
> 

The way I like to think about HAL, now that we got the scope figured out
(check the archives on the hal ml), is that it for the most part can be
integrated into GNOME in a non-intrusive way, e.g. as patches that gives
a compile-time option whether to use HAL or not.

The plan is definitely to have a stable API/ABI at some point, but I
think it's too early to promise that; one thing is that HAL is designed
to work on several operating systems, another thing is seeing it all
work :-) - it would be nice if someone worked on this for other OS'es
than those based on the Linux 2.6 kernel, it would certainly help us
freeze the current API/ABI. 

The current thinking is to freeze parts of HAL incrementally, for
instance when the gnome-vfs patch is complete and we're happy with g-v-m
and everything rocks, it would make sense to freeze that part. And the
same can be said about the other device classes HAL exports. So, step by
step..

So 2.8 might still be a bit early :-). However, that doesn't mean
distros can't start shipping HAL, g-v-m and e.g. gnome-vfs with HAL
patches, and some already ship parts of it.

Cheers,
David