HAL service scripts

[Martin Pitt]

Hello Iain,

Iain Buclaw [2010-04-15 10:07 +0100]:
> I am wondering if the service scripts in the hal package will be re-added
> before the release of Lucid?

No, we don't plan to.

> I can understand why they were removed (to force a change to ConsoleKit in
> the mainline Ubuntu) - but leaving them out leaves us light WM users in the
> dark (ie: when inserting a pendrive, and pcmanfm does not automount it).

It's got nothing to do with ConsoleKit; they are removed because we
switched over to D-BUS activation. I. e. if a program tries to talk to
hal, and it's not running, it triggers its startup. This works fine
for gnome-power-manager, pitivi, and KDE.

We do not want to start hal by default on machines where it's not
necessary, since it introduces an additional startup cost, and also
causes bugs/extra power usage due to the additional device probing and
polling.

> Currently, I am forced to include it in /etc/rc.local (or I could just
> extract the files from the package in karmic), but this shouldn't really
> have to be the case to resort to.

Right, this is just a workaround. In theory the startup of pcmanfm
should trigger hal startup. If it doesn't, the most likely reason is
that it is too cautious and checks if hal is running before trying to
connect to it (that's what "lshal" is doing, and the reason why lshal
doesn't trigger hal startup). If that's the case, just drop the check,
and have pcmanfm connect to hal straight away (and of course check if
that failed).

Martin


-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)