Trimming down gnome-applets (and removing HAL dependency)

[Chris Coulson]

On Sun, 2009-08-02 at 12:18 +0530, Bryan Quigley wrote:
> I agree on those two and have two more to add.  (If these are already
> gone/changed in karmic, sorry)
> Neither for full removal but they just shouldn't be ran per user at
> startup:
> Jockey - purpose is notification of hardware changes.  
> Update manager - purpose is notification of updates available
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 4:56 AM, Chris Coulson
> <chrisccoulson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>         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
>         
>         
>         
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>         ubuntu-desktop at lists.ubuntu.com
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> 
Thank you for your input, but I started this really to talk specifically
about gnome-applets. If you want to talk about removing other session
agents, then you might be better off starting a new topic with a more
appropriate title. And I don't really agree that you could remove the 2
examples you gave from user sessions anyway.

Regards
Chris