[rant] keeping policy in HAL

[Peter Hutterer]

On Tue, Dec 02, 2008 at 12:49:40AM -0200, Paulo César Pereira de Andrade wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 01, 2008 at 01:33:02PM +0000, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> >> 2. If the evdev driver is not installed on the system it does not flip
> >> it's default.
> >
> > Arguably, that's a busted configuration. The standard fdi tells HAL to add
> > input.x11_driver=evdev (on linux systems). If you then deny X the driver
> > you
> > explicitly told it to load, you end up without input devices.
> 
>   There is one problem with hal, that is with the current mini pcs,
> and related work to have a "fast boot". Needing to have hal up and
> running before the X Server would be a tough task.
> 
>   One possible solution, that I proposed some time ago (but got no
> response) would be to add something like an "UDI" option to input
> devices. So, one could have something like this in his xorg.conf:
> 
> Section "InputDevice"
>     Identifier "Mouse1"
>     Driver "mouse"
>     Option "UDI"
> "/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/platform_i8042_i8042_AUX_port_logicaldev_input"
>     Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
>     Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
> EndSection

why not just use Option "Device" "/dev/input/by-id/blahblahblah"?

>   Then, the code in config/hal.c:device_added() or somewhere in
> hw/xfree86/xf86Xinput.c could check that, and if it matches the
> device that was about to be added, just leave it alone...

evdev won't let you add a device with an already known major/minor again.
hal won't a device with a known UDI.

Cheers,
  Peter