On Mon, 07 May 2012 07:03:13 -0500
"David C. Rankin" <drankinatty@...> wrote:

> Tim, All,
> 
>   After the discussion both here and on the suse list about the removal of HAL,
> that brought up a question that I don't fully understand. I know that everyone
> is moving away from HAL and that it is the way of the future, but "Why?"
> 
>   Briefly - what is wrong with HAL? Is it dead upstream? Does is pose
> limitations on the ability to do X or Y going forward? If so what are X or Y? Is
> it udev? What?
> 
>   Like Qt3, all of the past versions of KDE3 and TDE have used HAL and work
> fantastically - what is the motivation for dumping it?
> 
>   A short sentence or two would help me understand -- or a simply link to why if
> you have one will do. Thanks, I just want to make sure I understand the issue
> better...

It's dead upstream, jettisoned in favour of DeviceKit (upower/udisks/etc.).  Apparently, 
the codebase was too big and complex to be maintained effectively.  See:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2008-May/011560.html

In addition to this, many distros have dropped it.  At the time it was dropped from
Gentoo, there were some small nuisance bugs due to its functionality overlapping
with other hardware backends (disks and other devices showing up twice in some
applications was the most common one, IIRC).

Given the reasons it's now an orphan, I don't think it's wise for us to assume its
maintenance (IIRC, Tim has already said he doesn't want to, anyway).  Best to
move on.