Re: Next stop Utopia, full steam ahead?

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 23:12 +0200, David Zeuthen wrote:
> If it only means creating and maintaining a 'stable' branch of HAL for
> the duration of the GNOME 2.8 series, sure, no problem, I can commit to
> that. 

I'm not so sure that an API/ABI guarantee even within a stable series is
a good idea quite yet.  For example, at this point I'm still not sure
that "net.ethernet.80211" is right instead of "net.ethernet.wireless" or
"net.wireless".  Unfortunately we have a string API and with it are all
the problems of a string API.  It's not the libhal API I'm concerned
about... that I think we can make relatively stable, it's the naming and
existence of most of the properties.

> The only interesting things we could export in that stable branch
> at that point though would be storage and network devices and maybe USB
> printers (Joe?), these seem to be pretty stable and useful today. 

I wouldn't want to limit the devices that are exposed...

> But the apps and libraries would still need #ifdef stuff whether to use
> HAL or not since Linux 2.6+udev+HAL might not be available everywhere
> where GNOME runs. The benefit IMHO would offset this cost though, but I
> guess I'm biased. Now, whether modules in the desktop have time to
> properly integrate with HAL for GNOME 2.8 is another discussion ;-)

Yeah.  As far as gnome-vfs integration goes, the API should be totally
encapsulated so we don't have to worry about leakages into the public
API.  I'd make the --enable-hal configure flag default to off so that it
has to be explicitly enabled.  From a programmer's standpoint there's no
difference, but the volume manager would have different behavior.

As for other apps, a policy of use-at-your-own-risk a la eel seems to
make more sense.

Joe