Re: Effing HAL



Freminlins wrote:
2009/10/29 Paul Schmehl <pschmehl_lists@xxxxxxxxx>

Far be it from me to pile on when you're already so frustrated, but I run
into these sorts of problems myself from time to time. It's usually because
I didn't bother to read /usr/ports/UPDATING first, which in this case might
have warned you.



Yeah, thanks for that. I knew about that file, but don't often read it.
There's even more to the saga - Xkblayout doesn't work. This whole HAL thing
stinks horribly. IF X is built with HAL basically certain options specified
in xorg.conf no longer work. HAL thinks it knows best. But it doesn't, cos
it's broken.

What really gets my goat about this is that things that used to work, and
people understand how they worked and how they were configured, no longer
work. And I'm 18MB of RAM worse off into the bargain.

There's a thread about other people's experience here:
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=10924#post10924. One of the posts
contains these words "I've been fighting this one for two days now, and
still don't have a fully working system." That's seriously nasty for anyone.

The whole Xorg thing, at least on FreeBSD, is just a minefield. I like to
remove unnecessary packages, to save space for when I do backups. I don't
have an Nvidia card on this box so:

pkg_delete xf86-video-nv-2.1.13
pkg_delete: package 'xf86-video-nv-2.1.13' is required by these other
packages
and may not be deinstalled:
xorg-drivers-7.4_1
xorg-7.4_1

Great. So what is the point in having a separate package if I can't remove
that damn thing? I know I can pkg_delete -f, but why make it hard?


Paul Schmehl, Senior Infosec Analyst


MF
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Yes, HAL does stink. As I understand it it drifted over from the Linux world. People smarter than I saw a need for it. (I'm not second guessing them here, after the typical hair pulling I read UPDATING and some of the angry but concise posts about HAL and everything has worked great since.)

Imagine my surprise then to read in a recent Ubuntu write-up that, with the release of Karmic Koala, their (Ubuntu's) use of HAL is on its way to deprecation. How long has it been around? A year? Two? And now it's headed for Linux's ever-expanding dustbin of ideas that were once sold as the greatest thing since sliced bread. This is why I use FreeBSD; as a counter-irritant to Linux's willy-nilly approach to development.
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