summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/system/hal-info/README
blob: 7593870c2704034027aba9ba21481c8f3c1e5e54 (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
hal-info is just a small hal package that provides hardware data and quirks.
These quirks are currently things like what mice support reporting battery
status, what music players are supported and what cameras are detected.
This could also include a list of display adaptors that need resuming or a 
list of broken batteries that might explode.

Why split the information data from the main tarball?
Well, policy and probing information is still in the daemon package where
they belong. Hal is released every few months with updated dependencies and 
lots of snazzy new features.  Users love this, stable distributions hate it, 
and don't update HAL, missing the newest hardware quirk updates. This means 
that new hardware often won't work out of the box until the next version of 
the distro is released.

For example, stable distro 'x' ships HAL 0.5.9 with no intention of updating
it other than for security fixes. Stable distro 'x' does however update from 
hal-info-20070516 to hal-info-{date} as there are no new features, minimal risk
of breaking, and lots of chance that more hardware that didn't work now will.