Re: Dropping HAL support from gvfs

[藍挺瑋 <lantw44 gmail com>]

於 星期四，2016-09-01 於 17:23 +0200，Michael Biebl 提到：
> Hi,
>
> in [1] I posted a patch, which drops the HAL code inside gvfs.
> HAL has been dead for many years. Throughout the GNOME stack HAL
> support has been removed, only exception is gvfs.
> I think we should do the same for gvfs, as this simplifies the gphoto2
> and cdda backends quite a bit. Atm the code is quite hard to read with
> all the #ifdefs.
> I'm also not sure, if the HAL code is actually still working.

I am a not gvfs package maintainer of any distribution, but I think HAL code is
still being run by most GNOME/Mate/Xfce/... users on FreeBSD because HAL option
is enabled by default in FreeBSD ports. I cannot say it is working without
problems, but there is still some user-visible features depending on HAL.

> Ondrej Holy, one of the gvfs developers, also wanted to know, if there
> are plattforms around, that still require this code.

Since udev only works on Linux, the only available hotplug backend on FreeBSD is
HAL. If --disable-hal is used when compiling gvfs, there will be no device
listed in the sidebar of Nautilus/Caja/Thunar. I think this probably means that
disbaling HAL implies disabling mounting support on FreeBSD and users are
required to manually mount filesystems with commands.

However, even if HAL is enabled, basic functions like listing available
filesystems and mounting seldom works for me in useful ways. The sidebar usually
had duplicate devices, doubling the size of the sidebar. It mounted FAT without
Unicode support enabled, and it mounted NTFS without write support even if ntfs-
3g is installed. It sometimes tried to mount all available filesystems
automatically after a successful login, causing more than 10 'Fail to mount'
dialogs to be shown. If this happened when a broken filesystem was present on
the system, it could cause the entire system to crash.

Instead of fixing HAL, I think the correct way to fix these problems is to
implement a FreeBSD devd backend in gvfs, but I don't know whether there are
people that are going to do it. If we remove HAL support before a better backend
is available, FreeBSD users may think it is a feature removal.

> Please speak up now, if you would be affected by this.
>
> Regards,
> Michael
>
> [1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=770671