Re: External dependencies, DeviceKit-power and GNOME Power Manager

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Tue, 2008-11-25 at 12:47 +0100, Denis Washington wrote:
> As udev is Linux-specific AFAIK, is there support for any other Unix 
> platform in DeviceKit? If we lost FreeBSD support for instance, that 
> would be a regression (hal works there).

DeviceKit (not -power or -disks) is a very small simple daemon that is
basically a thin wrapper over udev. You pretty much say "give me devices
that support power_supply" and it returns a list of object paths you can
use.

It's designed to be very easy to implement for Solaris and FreeBSD, and
you could even do it in a few hundred lines of python, if you knew all
the hardware details about those platforms. You would just have to
populate a directory tree that looked like a power_supply class under
Linux and everything would "just work" assuming there was something on
those platforms that could parse the trivial udev rules [1].

One option that might be best (but slightly controversial) would be for
FreeBSD or Solaris to present a Linux compatible /sys device tree,
either populated in userspace, or better, in the kernel.

Even if The FreeBSD guys couldn't get a DeviceKit daemon ready for the
2.26 release, they can happily ship supported 2.24 code until they do.

Richard.

[1] ATTR{idVendor}=="046d", ATTR{idProduct}=="c50e", ENV{ID_PRODUCT}="MX1000 Laser Mouse", ENV{DKP_BATTERY_TYPE}="mouse"