[gentoo-user] Re: OT: change and improvement

[Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com>]

On 2011-10-07, Canek Pel??ez Vald??s <caneko@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Some of us grumpy-old-guy types refused to play nice and didn't make
either transition.  We disabled HAL support in X.org [after X.org had
stopped working when HAL became the default].  Once we had HAL
disabled, we continued to to use the trusty old xorg.conf file until
the whole HAL thing blew over.

I'm going to ignore grub2 for as long as I can, but I don't think it's
going away the way HAL did... ;)

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