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

[Artem Kachitchkine <Artem Kachitchkin Sun COM>]

[Late to the party, a colleague forwarded this thread to me]

Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
> While it's refreshing for someone other than me to say this ;-), I have
> to admit that getting HAL working on FreeBSD was a good thing.  I look
> forward to the better API promised by DK.
>
> However, unlike Solaris (or maybe Solaris is in the same boat right now)
> the FreeBSD GNOME project doesn't have a lot of resources.  Right now,
> there are four of us that work on porting everything from Glib to Gecko
> to FreeBSD.  We've prided ourselves on staying as up-to-date as possible
> with GNOME.  However, when something very OS-specific comes out, it
> always takes us a while to get in sync since not all four of us know C,
> python, etc.
>
> At some point, we will catch up.  However, it would be better if we
> could have a transition period where both the new and legacy
> technologies work together to allow us to stay current, and give us the
> extra time to port the new modules.

Most of what Joe says about FreeBSD also applies to Solaris.

I'm the one who ported HAL to Solaris, though I no longer actively work 
on it. Several groups share responsibilities per their specialty: one 
person is responsible for the power/acpi code, another for printing, etc 
(the desktop group has never touched a line of HAL code, they are 
strictly an API consumer) - in that sense, DK's functional breakup would 
probably do us good. But it also means that the transition will take 
more time as more inter-group coordination is required.

I think DK port will be primarily driven by GNOME (as was HAL): when our 
desktop folks fail to build their latest GNOME components and realize 
their schedule jeopardized, they'll start pestering the OS folks. The OS 
folks will grumble for a while and eventually ask mgmt to fund a project 
to transition from HAL to DK. At least that's my pessimistic prediction :)

One more thing to mention. We've been trying to make HAL interfaces more 
suitable for multi-seat environments, especially Sun Rays, and there are 
some private patches to achieve that (including DBus patches to route 
signals to users vs broadcasting to all), though they never made it into 
production. Looks like we'd have to revisit those. Last time I looked, 
ConsoleKit had some undelivered promises in this area, wink.

All that said, we are committed to the continuing open collaboration. 
Great to see these types of discussions, keep 'em coming - critical 
decisions in the desktop space require a lot of transparency.

-Artem