[rant] keeping policy in HAL

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

Beso wrote:
> 2008/11/30 Kalle Vahlman <kalle.vahlman at gmail.com>:
>> Amusingly, GNOME is already seeing push to move *away* from HAL:
>>
>>  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2008-November/msg00247.html
>>
> they're just substituting it with devicekit, that does the same thing
> hal does but it's more modular and scalable.

IMHO, there is still one thing very wrong with the HAL approach. I am 
talking about their upstream inconsistency concerning configuration in 
fdi files.

Look, for example, on these bugs:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133456
http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2891

They are about the fact that removable storage devides are mounted with 
wrong options in popular desktop environments, and that there is no way 
to change it. Earlier, there were options like 
volume.policy.mount_option.*, that could be used to store mount options 
that should be used by default for certain filesystems. This is very 
important in order to get non-English characters in the filenames right. 
However, these options were deprecated because policy doesn't belong 
into HAL.

However, xorg gets things like keyboard layouts from HAL. This is also 
policy, and also important to get i18n right. But, for some reason, this 
is allowed to exist in HAL, and default mount options aren't. Could you, 
xorg/HAL developers, at least be consistent, and either undeprecate 
volume.policy.mount_option.*, or invent a different place (i.e., 
something else than fdi files) to keep the default keyboard layout and 
deprecate the corresponding HAL keys?

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov