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Revision as of 23:16, 17 November 2010 by Kkofler (talk | contribs) (→‎Detailed Description: Update KDE status.)


HAL Removal

Summary

HAL is a behemoth, do-it-all, daemon to access hardware. It is now obsoleted by udisks (né DeviceKit-disks) and upower (né DeviceKit-power), as well as libudev for device discovery.

This feature tracks the removal of HAL in the Fedora Desktop spin.

See also:

GNOME upstream tracker

Ubuntu tracker

Debian tracker

Note that gnome-vfs2 still relies on HAL, and is dragged in through libgnomeui. So removing the gnome-vfs2, or libgnomeui dependencies from applications also helps towards that goal.

Owner

  • email: bnocera@redhat.com

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 40
  • Last updated: 2010-03-23
  • Percentage of completion: 80%


Detailed Description

Packages in the desktop spin:

Package name Status Bug reports or discussions
cheese done
epiphany done Removed obsolete gnome-vfs2-devel dependency
evolution done
evolution-data-server done
gdm done upstream bug 572765, fedora bug 567432
gnome-pilot TODO upstream bug 593936
gnome-power-manager done? upstream bug 593933
gnome-vfs2 WONTFIX Applications should be removing their use of gnome-vfs2 and use gvfs instead. Direct gnome-vfs2 rdeps:

dasher (DONE upstream)
dia (DONE upstream)
glade3-libgladeui
gnome-python2-applet
gnome-python2-gnome
gnome-python2-gnomevfs
gnome-python2-libegg
im-chooser
inkscape (fedora bug 653516)
libgnome
libgnomeui
planner (DONE upstream)
thunderbird
xulrunner

gstreamer-plugins-good done
gvfs done upstream bug 586410
gvfs-obexftp done upstream bug 586411 and upstream bug 511671
libfprint done Still requires hal-filesystem
libgpod done
libmtp done libmtp-hal subpackage requires hal-info
pm-utils done fedora bug 636382
rhythmbox done upstream bug 604186 fedora bug
shotwell done
system-setup-keyboard done Used for keymap selection
xine-lib done dependency on gnome-vfs2 removed
xorg-x11-server-Xorg done

Other packages outside the desktop spin:

Package name Status Bug reports or discussions
beldi TODO
blueman TODO fedora bug 561019
exaile TODO upstream bug
gimp TODO upstream bug
gnome-commander TODO Requires gnome-vfs2-smb upstream bug
gnome-device-manager TODO
gparted done fedora bug 586377
hplip done? upstream bug
ifuse TODO
k3b done
kdebase-runtime TODO Requires hal-storage-addon. The dependency can probably be dropped after Solid is ported (see next item).
kdelibs TODO DONE upstream, TODO in Rawhide: Solid requires HAL in the KDE platform <= 4.5.x. u* backends are now available in 4.6 trunk. We're currently waiting for the upstream 4.6 Beta 1 release. (There are no Alpha releases of KDE anymore, so Beta 1 is the first set of tarballs from the branch.)
libconcord TODO
libvirt done
lxsession TODO upstream bug
matahari TODO
nut TODO
ovirt-server TODO ovirt-server-installer subpackage requires hal
pcsc-lite TODO Requires hal-libs
razertool TODO
smolt TODO fedora bug 634883
xfce4-cddrive-plugin TODO
xfce4-power-manager TODO
xfce4-volstatus-icon TODO

Benefit to Fedora

Faster boot-up, and removal of obsoleted technology.

Scope

Loads of applications require HAL itself, or libhal. Applications should not rely on HAL, or libhal being available.

How To Test

Need to test:

  • yum remove hal-filesystem hal-libs
  • Check that nothing gets removed because it depends on hal
  • Check that applications that access hardware still work as before

User Experience

  • Faster boot-up
  • Possibly faster applications startup when switching from libhal to libgudev for device enumeration

Dependencies

  • See description

Contingency Plan

  • Still ship HAL. If the last thing that depends on hal is gnome-power-manager for the backlight support, we can stop running hal as a service at boot and make it dbus-activated instead.

Documentation

N/A

Release Notes

  • Fedora now does not ship with the HAL daemon, and libhal by default. If a specific application require libhal to function, please file a bug against it to be ported to the new technology.

Comments and Discussion