Trimming down gnome-applets (and removing HAL dependency)

[Chris Coulson]

Hi,

As you're all aware, the mixer-applet was recently disabled in Karmic.
This got me thinking about whether we need all the other applets we
currently have on the default install, and I wondered whether there were
any others that could be disabled too.

I just wanted to know what everyone else thought. The ones that are
currently installed which I think could probably be disabled are:

*** battstatus ***

This currently is able to use either a HAL backend or the
legacy /proc/acpi interface for obtaining battery information. This has
previously been (and might still be) a source of bugs when the legacy
interface presents inconsistent information compared to what
gnome-power-manager says (eg, battstatus saying laptop is on AC where
g-p-m says it is on battery). AFAIK, the legacy /proc/acpi interface has
been deprecated for some time, and we don't really want the HAL backend
either. I'm not sure what benefit this adds in addition to the
gnome-power-manager status icon, but I think it is a good candidate for
removal. It is also the only applet in gnome-applets which depends on
HAL. Fedora don't ship this applet currently.

*** modemlights ***

This has a dependency on network-admin from gnome-system-tools which we
don't even install by default anymore, so is crippled on the default
install anyway. To be functional, users will need to manually download
gnome-network-admin, so I'm not sure if we'd lose anything by removing
this applet.

Do people have any objections to removing these applets, or know if any
users are still using them? Perhaps you can think of some other applets
that could also be disabled? Is there any use-case I have missed which
would prohibit the removal of these 2 applets?

Regards
Chris