Re: [gentoo-dev] Resolving HAL vs. pciutils/usbutils

[Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org>]

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Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> Heya,
> 
> So now this is not a flamewar.
> 
> Jakub was originally going to complain at me for the upstream usbutils
> adding support for gzipped usb.ids files, but a group of us (myself,
> dsd, jakub, leio, steev) had a discussion about it, and came up with a
> solution that both ends the breakage for direct users (HAL and others),
> and provides forward momentum.
> 
> So firstly, what's the real problem? The original complaint came up
> because HAL expected the uncompressed file to exist as pci.ids, and
> wasn't ready to look at pci.ids.gz. While this caused breakage, it was
> only a warning sign that there was a deeper problem.

I don't feel strongly enough to make an objection to your commit, but I 
think pciutils is doing the right thing, and despite me and Mike putting 
a hours into getting a decent HAL patch together the response I got was 
that as upstream they are simply "not interested" (no technical or 
logical objections provided), so I don't feel you should be putting 
workarounds in pciutils just to make HAL happy.

Especially because HAL really doesn't use pci.ids for anything useful. I 
am attaching a HAL ebuild patch which is the approach I'm in favour of 
and first mentioned several months ago. It does not require any HAL 
patches or pciutils modifications. It stems from the fact that really 
HAL doesn't really do anything useful with the ID-to-name mappings 
provided in pci.ids. It makes "that HAL bug" disappear with the click of 
the fingers. I didn't really get any proper answer why our HAL 
maintainers weren't keen on this when I first mentioned it.

Daniel

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--- hal-0.5.9-r1.ebuild.orig	2007-10-31 10:34:34.000000000 +0000
+++ hal-0.5.9-r1.ebuild	2007-10-31 10:46:15.000000000 +0000
@@ -80,13 +80,6 @@ function notify_inotify() {
 }
 
 pkg_setup() {
-	if ! built_with_use --missing false sys-apps/pciutils hal ; then
-		if built_with_use --missing false sys-apps/pciutils zlib ; then
-			eerror "You MUST build sys-apps/pciutils without the zlib USE flag"
-			die "You MUST build sys-apps/pciutils without the zlib USE flag"
-		fi
-	fi
-
 	if use kernel_linux; then
 		kernel_is ge 2 6 17 || ewarn "HAL requires a kernel version 2.6.17 or newer"
 
@@ -147,6 +140,7 @@ src_unpack() {
 src_compile() {
 	local backend=""
 	local acpi=""
+	local myconf=""
 
 	# TODO :: policykit should have a pam useflag
 	append-flags -rdynamic
@@ -164,6 +158,15 @@ src_compile() {
 		acpi="--disable-acpi-proc --disable-acpi-acpid"
 	fi
 
+	if [[ ! -e "${ROOT}"/usr/share/misc/pci.ids ]]; then
+		myconf="--disable-pci-ids"
+		elog "It looks like you've built pciutils with the zlib USE flag"
+		elog "meaning that your /usr/share/misc/pci.ids file is compressed"
+		elog "and incompatible with HAL. You almost certainly won't notice "
+		elog "any feature loss here, but if you do, just re-emerge pciutils "
+		elog "without the zlib flag, then re-emerge hal."
+	fi
+
 	econf --disable-policy-kit \
 		  --docdir=/usr/share/doc/${PF} \
 		  --with-os-type=gentoo \
@@ -182,6 +185,7 @@ src_compile() {
 		  $(use_enable selinux) \
 		  --disable-console-kit \
 		  ${acpi} \
+		  $myconf \
 	|| die "configure failed"
 #$(use_enable pam console-kit)