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authorRichard Hughes <richard@hughsie.com>2006-12-22 19:22:40 +0000
committerRichard Hughes <richard@hughsie.com>2006-12-22 19:22:40 +0000
commit71b2a0b15a55d4d8f2739297b9998f721053bff4 (patch)
tree5512999caa89adb7ed5c018697d6ef6af5c0a737
parentf33ffb6cb819b5f263a2742e5422532cf01f979d (diff)
add info about hal-info to HACKING and add dependency to NEWS
Add information about hal-info to HACKING and add the new dependency to NEWS.
-rw-r--r--HACKING38
-rw-r--r--NEWS1
2 files changed, 39 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/HACKING b/HACKING
index 3be1b901..7e9bb5b5 100644
--- a/HACKING
+++ b/HACKING
@@ -1,3 +1,41 @@
+hal-info
+===
+
+The information FDI scripts have been moved to a subpackage called hal-info.
+
+Q: What is it?
+A: 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.
+
+Q: Why split the information data from the main tarball?
+A: 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.
+
+So, 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-20061107 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.
+
+What does this mean for:
+
+ * An end user: Not much - all the fdi files are installed in the
+ same places as they used to be.
+ * A distro packager: hal should depend on hal-info, of any version.
+ Existing patches to the fdi files in fdi/information should be moved
+ to the hal-info product.
+ * Release architect: updating hal-info shouldn't break anything
+ that already works or add new dependencies.
+ * Developer: hal-info should be checked out in the same level
+ directory as hal if you intend to use ./run-hald.sh
SCM
===
diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 062928e7..6c227990 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@ Requirements for HAL 0.5.9 ""
- dbus >= 0.60 (with glib bindings)
- glib >= 2.6.0
- expat >= 1.95.8
+ - hal-info >= 20061114
- libusb >= 0 0.1.10a (optional)
- pciutils >= 2.2.3 (optional
- dmidecode >= 2.7 (optional)