Re: Patch: detection of Palm with latest HAL no longer working

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>]

Le mardi 25 mars 2008 à 10:24 +0000, Matt Davey a écrit :
> Hi Frederic,

First, I apologize for my slow response, I got busy in finishing
Mandriva 2008 Spring and I also attended conference in the mean time.

> 
> On Fri, 2008-03-21 at 19:10 +0100, Frederic Crozat wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > we switched in Mandriva to hal 0.5.11 (rc2 at the moment, final is
> > pretty imminent) and info.bus is no longer advertised as part of usb
> > devices (key has been deprecated).
> 
> Thanks for pointing this out.  I would like to support hal backwards
> compatibility for the moment, so how about we check for pda.platform
> first, and then fall back to devices.xml and info.bus (or another,
> supported, way to query USB vendor/device IDs)?  That way we avoid
> requiring the most up to date HAL version for gnome-pilot - if someone
> wants the new bluetooth support on an existing installation, they
> shouldn't need to upgrade HAL.

Yes, fallback is probably better than my dirty search and replace
patch ;)

> > The attached patch changes this check with a check on pda.platform.
> > 
> > Those keys have been recently added in hal-info to detect all known
> > Palms (supported by pilot-link) so device permissions can now be handled
> > by hal / ConsoleKit / PolicyKit.
> > 
> > I think a good patch or hal_device_added logic (including usage of
> > devices.xml) could be removed since most of the information needed for
> > device detection is now directly available from HAL, including the right
> > device to use (when using visor module).
> 
> How robust do you think the usbserial tty device identification can be?
> I'd love to be proved wrong, but I'd be surprised if this had actually
> been solved!  There have been many attempts over the years, and if you
> have a device that behaves differently and confuses HAL, you'd be pretty
> annoyed if there isn't a workaround.

Well, ATM, hal doesn't do any USB tty device identification. It only
uses USB ids. And we know usb ID are not reliables for USB tty, since
several Palm devices share same usb ID and uses different tty.

My suggestion was for people using libusb pilot-link and not for visor
module based pilot-link.

> I do agree that letting HAL do more work is the right thing to do, but
> it has to make life easier for the users.
> 
> A would be useful to rework the config applet to do more automated
> detection of usb/serial/net/bluetooth devices - listen to everything and
> configure the first palm that connects.

Then it would need to be integrated with nautilus new "volume manager"
so it would be auto-started when a palm is started but was never
configured.

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>
Mandriva