Hi David,

Welcome back. I hope all is well. :)

>The question that
>brought up was "do I need to modify any of the scripts I use that 
>update my
>local git repo to handle the 'origin/v3.5.13-sru' designation, or 
>will the
>change be handled by the .gitmodule data?

Look at the scripts directory:

http://git.trinitydesktop.org/cgit/scripts/tree/

Basically all I do is run switch_all_submodules_to_head_and_clean 
inside a wrapper script.

>  What is the state of HAL requirements? I presume it is still 
>fully required in
>3.5.13, but what about 14? I will be building 3.5.13, so I'll 
>start by checking
>on the state of HAL in the Arch user repository.

Trinity R14 has its own HAL-independent hardware support. 3.5.13.2 
still uses HAL available. You can use HAL in R14 if you want, you 
need to apply the appropriate configuration options. Look at the 
following tdelibs config if you want to build outside the defaults:

-DWITH_HAL
-DWITH_TDEHWLIB_DAEMONS
-DWITH_UPOWER
-DWITH_UDISKS
-DWITH_UDISKS2

I believe most if not all of the development team is using R14. 
Many of us have 3.5.13.2 test partitions or VMs. 3.5.13.2 can be 
built from the official tarballs, whereas R14 is built from the GIT 
tree.

Although there have been many changes in the past months, the 
structure of the git tree remains the same. The scripts noted above 
have not been modified in a long while either.

Darrell