Re: PROPOSAL: GNOME Volume Manager for GNOME 2.8

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 01:23, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:
> >> What is required to port this to FreeBSD (or any other non-Linux OS)?
> 
> >Absolutely nothing! :)
> >It does not use anything but HAL.
> 
> Why does this tutorial here  requires gnome-python2?
> http://freedesktop.org/Software/ProjectUtopiaBuildDebian
> AFAIK, python-gnome2/pyGTK is not even part of the Gnome Binding project
> (yet) and *most* linux distros don't ship with these bindings (let alone
> non-Linux OSes).
> 

In the HAL tarball there's a nifty little tool called hal-device-manager
written in Python that shows the device tree and properties for each
device; this is really meant as a tool for developers for HAL (and
making fancy screenshots :-), it's not ready for primetime and it
probably won't be. Something similar should be done for GNOME, but in C
and done right.

The HAL daemon currently requires expat, glib, gobject which comes
installed as standard on most distros. It also requires dbus-1 and
dbus-glib-1. The libhal stuff requires only dbus-1. The glib, gobject
stuff may be dropped in the daemon at some point, but right now there
are more important things to focus on.

> Even if the python bindings are not really needed, there should be some more
> discussion as to how BSDs, IRIX, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and Darwin/PPC will be
> able to run Gnome if HAL/udev/etc will be really needed by the core and no
> fallbacks are given.
> 

Right, as I stated earlier HAL should be treated the same way as e.g.
FAM, e.g. applications/libraries need to provide fallbacks. Clearly,
g-v-m can't do that, but then it's just not installed. So you may lose
functionality, but this is, theoretically, no worse than if FAM is not
installed. And oh, once HAL is ported to one of those platforms, all the
functionality will be available.

Hope this helps,
David