So what's the new deal about HAL anyhow?

[Gtrax]

HAL - Hardware Abstraction Layer. One of those clever things that automatically start up during boot. I don't know what HAL actually does, but I do notice that the next Ubuntu (10.04 Lucid Lynx) claims as a feature "HAL removal" - see DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

Hence the questions .. was HAL ever a "good thing"? Why would such a relatively new feature be trashed by a leading distro? What did it do for us anyway?

G

[daark.child]

HAL is being replaced by Devicekit which is already shipped by Fedora (I think other distros are also replacing HAL with devicekit), so Ubuntu are following a trend. Devicekit is developed bysome of the same people who developed HAL and apparently is was developed because of HALs complexity and redundancy with other libraries in the Linux environment.

[oz]

It seems that we've been bombarded with various *-kit packages over the last year or so, some of which are causing issues for lots of Linux users. If this kit fad (or whatever it is) continues, we'll need a kit-kit package before long to manage all the many kits on our systems. I really hope they can get this all sorted so that so many things don't continue to break for so many users. Of course, if in the end it should turn out to be a big improvement, that's a good thing.

[daark.child]

One problem I see very often with many Linux distros is that they can be too quick to jump onto the bandwagon of whatever new technology is released even before its stable and ready for the masses. KDE4 and pulseaudio come to mind. Some of these *kit technologies are still young and in active development, but many distros are including them as standard.

[bigtomrodney]

I'd agree with you on the KDE4 thing daark.child, that was a disaster. The devs forgot they were working with actual daily users and put everything into unstable-dev mode making everyone a beta (or alpha) tester.

Pulseaudio gets too much of a bad rep in my mind. I don't get soundcard locks anymore and I'm starting to reap the benefits, fine tuning individual application's levels and even transparently moving sound to my bluetooth headset when needed.

I have no fear of the *-kit systems, they're largely very good. Hal, hotplug and udev worked great together and I really see the device-kit as being a natural progression from that. I seem to remember people being upset when udev came out, that it was harder to manage devices manually. Well that may have killed the hobbiest approach of getting everything modprobed yourself but on the other hand I have a Linux system that just works now

Actually you guys might be interested to know that Devicekit will now be renamed to UDisks. There will also be upower, these names probably reflecting their tight integration and/or similarities with udev.

[oz]

Actually you guys might be interested to know that Devicekit will now be renamed to UDisks. There will also be upower, these names probably reflecting their tight integration and/or similarities with udev.

Good to know, BigTom.

What has been bugging me is not the packages themselves, or what they do, but more the fact that the developers were getting all caught up in this thing where they thought the word kit had to be attached to so many different packages. It just didn't really seem all that cool to me, but I suppose many of them thought it was, or is.