Re: [gentoo-user] hal - what's the benefit of using it

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday 04 February 2009 09:39:15 Helmut Jarausch wrote:
> Hi,
>
> having had some problems with recent xorg version my question is
> what are the benefits (if any) of building packages with the 'hal'
> use flag (i.e. adding 'hal' to US='...' in /etc/make.conf)
>
> Many thanks for your sharing your experience,
> Helmut.

There's no benefit as such. hal is a crock of shit that never worked right as 
the designer intended, and he said so publicly on his blog. He has a plan to 
replace it with something else that might work. It's similar to devfs which 
led to udev to replace it.

Meanwhile, trying to run KDE or Gnome on a box without hal is becoming more 
and more painful with each update. Even xorg is getting in on the hal game 
and using hal to auto-configure input devices.

Unless you know of a compelling need to remove it, chances are your life will 
be some much easier if you just add hal to USE and be done with it.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com