[gpm] Re: Common Linux Power Management (HAL and NUT) (was: Re: ideas for a new UPS infrastructure)

[Stanislav Brabec <sbrabec suse cz>]

> 2006/3/10, David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>:

> > One thing about HAL is that we can never have a configuration file
> > saying where to look for devices; the whole philosophy about HAL is to
> > detect your devices and present the desktop bits with an extremely
> > well-defined view.

Even if it is against spirit of HAL, why not define unified format for
undetectable devices? I guess it will not break the well-defined view
and not only serial UPSes can benefit from it:
- Unable or dangerous to detect non-PnP ISA cards (sound,...).
- Special and obscure serial devices.
- Obscure and old parallel devices (newer support BiTronics detection).
- Historic displays or displays connected to historic video cards.
- Maybe UPS power cabling.
- Maybe devices connected to I2C buses.

I can imagine that we put undetectable device descriptor (that can come
from manufacturer in future) somewhere into say
/usr/share/hal/devices/foo.dev, then specify in some configuration file,
that /etc/hal/extra-devices.conf, that will define, that foo.dev is
connected to /dev/ttyS0. Then the future standard device autoscanner
will skip /dev/ttyS0 when searching for modems.

-- 
Best Regards / S pozdravem,

Stanislav Brabec
software developer
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