[Rhythmbox-devel] HAL removal

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan d14n org>]

Over the last couple of days I have committed a set of changes to
reimplement the parts of rhythmbox that were using HAL.  The HAL code is
still there, but the new code is used if possible.  The new code
requires GUdev 143 or newer.

For identification of USB mass storage devices, we're now using a
library I created called libmediaplayerid, in conjunction with a set of
media player description files and udev rules you can find here:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~teuf/media-player-id/

If you don't want to install the media-player-id files under /usr, you
can use the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable to locate them, but the
udev rules must be installed in /lib/udev/rules.d or /etc/udev/rules.d
for it to work at all.

Since nothing besides rhythmbox is using libmediaplayerid, it currently
lives in the rhythmbox source tree.  It may move somewhere else some
day.

We also have GUdev-based code for detecting MTP devices, which should
work better than the HAL code in two ways: it should work with multiple
devices, and it should detect MTP devices that aren't yet in libmtp's
known device list.