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Revision as of 13:28, 15 June 2010 by Nsoranzo (talk | contribs) (โ†’โ€ŽHow To Test: yum remove is more common than yum erase)


๐Ÿ”— HAL Removal

๐Ÿ”— Summary

HAL is a behemoth, do-it-all, daemon to access hardware. It is now obsoleted by udisks (nรฉ DeviceKit-disks) and upower (nรฉ 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.

๐Ÿ”— Owner

  • email: bnocera@redhat.com

๐Ÿ”— Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 42
  • Last updated: 2010-03-23
  • Percentage of completion: 80%


๐Ÿ”— 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, 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:

dia (DONE upstream)
firefox
thunderbird
evolution (DONE upstream)
gnome-python2-applet
gnome-python2-gnome
gnome-python2-gnomevfs
gnome-python2-libegg
im-chooser
inkscape
libgnome
libgnomeui
xine-lib-extras
xulrunner
dasher (DONE upstream)
gnome-pilot (DONE upstream)
planner (DONE upstream)

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 Still requires hal-info
pm-utils TODO (in progress) waiting for upstream
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

Important packages outside the desktop spin:

Package name Status Bug reports or discussions
gimp TODO upstream bug
gparted TODO fedora bug
hplip TODO upstream bug
k3b done
kdebase-runtime TODO Requires hal-storage-addon
kdelibs TODO Solid requires HAL in the KDE platform 4.4. According to upstream, a u* backend will be available in 4.5 at the earliest, but more likely 4.6.
libvirt done
pcsc-lite TODO Requires hal-libs
smolt TODO

๐Ÿ”— Benefit to Fedora

Faster boot-up, and removal of obsoleted technology.

๐Ÿ”— Scope

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

๐Ÿ”— 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

๐Ÿ”— User Experience

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

๐Ÿ”— Dependencies

  • See description

๐Ÿ”— 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.

๐Ÿ”— Documentation

N/A

๐Ÿ”— 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.

๐Ÿ”— Comments and Discussion