[rant] keeping policy in HAL

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

Peter Hutterer wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 09:17:47PM +0500, Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
>> 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?
> 
> You can change the keyboard layout at runtime, and the majority of users do
> exactly that by setting the layout in their desktop environment. So having
> that in HAL is not necessary in most cases.

Obvious problem: it is too late to set the keyboard layout in the 
desktop environment. The user has to type the login and the password 
into the display manager, and the keyboard layout has to be correct at 
this stage, too.

> Most other settings in the more popular input drivers are now configurable
> at runtime too (where now == server 1.6), so you basically just have to
> convince your DE to provide pretty interfaces for them.

May I then convince XDM maintainers to provide such interface or, if 
this is impossible, to drop this broken software from Xorg?

Well, in fact, there is such interface (the Xsetup_0 file), it just 
lacks the comment that such commands should be placed there. If this 
works without races (i.e., if the setxkbmap command there will modify 
the layout for both currently connected keyboards and the default for 
future devices), I will consider the issue closed as long as this 
command (commented-out by default) is added there in GIT.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov