From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([208.92.234.80] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1RC2i5-0003vF-C7 for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Fri, 07 Oct 2011 05:11:01 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 9E14521C0B8; Fri, 7 Oct 2011 05:10:52 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail-ww0-f53.google.com (mail-ww0-f53.google.com [74.125.82.53]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8E4F621C024 for ; Fri, 7 Oct 2011 05:09:54 +0000 (UTC) Received: by wwg14 with SMTP id 14so4644502wwg.10 for ; Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:09:53 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=mime-version:in-reply-to:references:date:message-id:subject:from:to :content-type:content-transfer-encoding; bh=yR64aUGn3dTUThaj7Q3EeeihpJoj0InOX/nZMrtOjSg=; b=ZT1fUQYYkugQYgXpYIX3kkw+5KsGqaH2js9GCJUr0qAFAJ+BETsLsit5PLv0mjhFFu 8g2XpNyWc/bhbzu4dRvjZp3ZcBCL4apzuq7ELRpSpNMWrasbNEyAEpgIH1IoEh0r9WJa YrkAv56zOa78GtnBhBEx3YeKZ9a/euldPpDvw= Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.216.179.7 with SMTP id g7mr1796501wem.64.1317964193684; Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:09:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.216.132.80 with HTTP; Thu, 6 Oct 2011 22:09:53 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: References: <4E8AD6C4.7070901@gmail.com> <20111005162007.GA5820@badass.gateway.2wire.net> <20111005184721.01af0bda@toxic.dbnet> <201110060018.50015.peter@humphrey.ukfsn.org> <20111006102023.4471babe@toxic.dbnet> <4E8E0112.3010208@orlitzky.com> <20111006230040.04f9af0f@toxic.dbnet> <4E8E72B3.9070703@gmail.com> Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2011 22:09:53 -0700 Message-ID: Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: OT: change and improvement From: =?UTF-8?B?Q2FuZWsgUGVsw6FleiBWYWxkw6lz?= To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Archives-Salt: X-Archives-Hash: 11322a1ad9e880b91bece7d86a01f0af On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 8:39 PM, Michael Mol wrote: > > On Oct 6, 2011 11:34 PM, "Dale" wrote: >> >> Grant Edwards wrote: >>> >>> On 2011-10-06, Jonas de Buhr =C2=A0wrote: >>> >>>> don't get me started, the suppressed memories about HAL-config or >>>> broken suse-10 usermount may come back ;) >>> >>> HAL... shudder. >>> >> >> Let's not get started on hal. =C2=A0Pardon me while I go pray to the por= celain >> gods. =C2=A0:/ > > I'm really sorry, but I missed that show. I was in Ubuntu-land learning n= ot > to tweak system behaviors.=C2=A0 WTF was the deal with HAL? What was it s= upposed > to do? Why didn't it work? HAL was the Hardware Abstraction Layer. The idea was that it would be an index of the computer's hardware, so high level parts of the stack would know what hardware and capabilities were available, without the need of communicate with the kernel directly. This had the (perceived) advantage of bein "portable", so for example a program using HAL could run in any OS. Even Windows was theoretically included. But it ended being *HUGE*, because it needed to handle a lot of different hardware and Operating System quirks, and the design was rigid and not very scalable. Also, it turns out that a lot of Operating Systems do not have the necessary developers to fill the specifications required by HAL: if I remember correctly, Solaris and the *BSD family of systems implemented only a fraction of what was needed. So, as is usually the case with "portable" code, the software using HAL had to use the minimum common denominator. In the end, udev was making huge advances, and HAL could not keep up simply because the other Operating Systems didn't have similar capabilities, so the consumers of HAL (desktop systems, mostly) started to use udev directly. That was when the shit hit the fan: if the purpose of HAL was to mantain "portability", but the biggest and most active developer community (Linux) refused to use it since it didn't allowed them to use the full capabilities of the operating system, then it had (literally) no reason to live. So the HAL mantainers saw the error of their ways, and they deprecated it, saying to the user space developers that, in Linux, they should use udev, and in other Operating Systems whatever was equivalent, if any. It was really fast, if I remember correctly: one day half the programs in my computers used HAL, and the next every single one of them stopped using it. In Gentoo in particular was pretty rough, since the X.org version that used HAL had just become stable (which was kinda difficult to transition to), and next thing you know, you again had to transition, this time to a HAL-free X.org. A lot of users got really angry in Gentoo because of that. I remember it was a couple of days getting everything back to normal, but it required taking down at least one production system, and basically rebuilding everything on the desktop stack in a workstation computer (since the desktop was the most heavy user of HAL). But I had it worse with the glitz cairo USE flag, or the several expat problems that always arise when you update that library. HAL was bad, but (IMHO) not *that* bad. In the end, everything is fine I believe. The desktops (all of them) have made a lot of advances in Linux since they no longer had to use the minimum common denominator, and it showed a lot of devs that the mythical grail of "portability" is not that great at the end of the day. That's one of the reasons the developer of systemd refuses to make it portable to other Unixes: it allows him to use all the great and specific features of Linux, and not to worry about other systems. If other systems want something similar to systemd, they have the liberty of programming themselves, of course. This is how I remember it. If I made I mistake, someone please correct me. Regards. --=20 Canek Pel=C3=A1ez Vald=C3=A9s Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingenier=C3=ADa de la Computaci=C3=B3n Universidad Nacional Aut=C3=B3noma de M=C3=A9xico