On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:59:07 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: > Most devices fall into one of two groups: storage and I/O. > Auto-mounters do not care about your keyboard, whereas X needs to know > about your monitor, card, keyboard, mouse. Why does hal try and > abstract both? Seems silly to me.
On the other hand, having a single method of configuring such things does give consistency, and means you have to learn only one syntax, but see below. You cannot totally separate the two areas, for example a keylogger may need access to both I/O and storage, so a central, separate resource used by all software is more in keeping with the Unix way than each program including its own implementation. > One could also argue that the developer's state of mind is reflected in > the chosen method of configuration - xml files. This just defies all > understanding. Apart from the fact that real-world xml is almost > unreadable, the conditions that make xml useful are simply not present > in hal... I couldn't agree more. XML was very fashionable a few years ago, maybe this influenced the developer. Hell, I was even guilty of using it myself :( As an alternative to binary configuration files, XML is a step in the right direction, but it should not be used where users are expected to edit the files. In some ways, the worth or otherwise of HAL, from a user perspective, has been largely obscured by the difficulty in reading, let alone editing, its configuration files. -- Neil Bothwick I am MODERATOR of BORG. Follow the rules or be assimilated.
