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

[Matt Davey <mcdavey mrao cam ac uk>]

Hi Frederic,

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.

This is unfortunate timing coming, as it does, just after 2.0.16 is out
the door....

> 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.

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. 

Matt

Matt Davey	  Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; 
mcdavey mrao cam ac uk 	     seek what they sought.  -- Basho