Ongoing items that always need work ----------------------------------- - Valgrind once in a while to check / fix memory leaks / memory corruption - Keep the spec in sync with the code - Write / check / update docs of exported libraries - Audit all code and drop privileges in helpers where appropriate Items specifically planned for 0.5.10 (TODO: need to go through and nominate things for 0.5.10) ------------------------------------ - Sort out input device classification mess - Don't invoke setfacl(1) directly; use system calls instead - Should provide a hal-fdi-file-validate tool that validates fdi files. - Release engineering. Would be nice to have a set of Makefile targets to automatically make a new release, upload it somewhere and send announcement mail. Seems that cairo have something we might be able to lift. - Make sure we check if the optical drives supports the commands we are sending to it (proposed by pjones) - Singleton addons (s-addon); the idea that an add-on can attach to several device objects at the same time. - A s-addon would just implement, say, the interface org.freedesktop.Hal.SingletonAddon with methods DeviceAdded(), DeviceRemoved() through the hald direct connection. - An s-addon would be identified by it's commandline; e.g. info.s-addons = {"my-s-addon --foo", "my-s-addon --bar"} would be two distinct addons. - Bluez devs need this to start the Bluez daemon via HAL - Can consolidate other things like hald-addon-keyboard - Move /usr/libexec to /usr/lib/hal/ - drop /usr/lib/hal/scripts - use /usr/lib/hal/methods. Need to provide backwards compat for 3rd party so we need to retain /usr/lib/hal/scripts - Think hard about the interfaces HAL exports to addons as out-of-tree code like NUT and Bluez now starts to use it. Includes interface stability thoughts and what we guarantee and what we don't. Might have license implications too. - LVM support https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6427 - Format volume methods - Disk partitioning methods - File system label renaming - Provide mechanism for polling storage devices we can't poll regulary e.g. PC floppy drives and Zip drives. When that it is, actually go back to provide children for volumes detected like we did in HAL 0.4.x - Provide mechanism for tuning the readahead size. For example, a DVD player application (such as GNOME's Totem) might want to read ahead several hundreds of megabyte so the drive only needs to spin up every e.g. 20 minutes while watching a DVD movie. This enables the kernel driver to put the drive in a low-power mode to get substantially better battery life. Probably requires kernel work since the pages would have to be pinned? - Use udev data instead of probing (whenever possible). Here we need the raw serial from udev; for e.g. USB drives, udev prepends it with the make/model of the usb device. - Configuration of serial and other legacy ports, see http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2006-August/005784.html - Clean up what the user did by invoking methods on HAL - e.g. unmount storage devices - other things - we can now sanely do this thanks to ConsoleKit - depends on PolicyKit - Make HAL unconditionally depend on pm-utils and rip out support for distro-specific tools - Devices of capability access_control could export an interface with for requesting / dropping access to the device, e.g. RequestAccess() GiveupAccess() (better naming welcome) which will change device file ownership or add/remove an ACL. Depends on PolicyKit - It would be nice if method calls could return string, bool int etc. Perhaps use dbus-send style, e.g. int32:' or 'string:the_string' or 'bool:true'. Granted, this is already possible today through addons so maybe not important. Other items ----------- - Device firmware. It would be nice to export a property and some DeviceCondition when a device asked for firmware that was missing and is such in a state where it cannot operate. Might need kernel work. Same goes for drivers. - Export ink levels for printers https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2295 - Signal when a USB device doesn't have enough power https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4452 (it appears that this is true IFF the kernel leaves bConfigurationValue as zero) - Teach HAL about multisession and partitioned optical discs - may require reworking the 'fakevolume' code as we'd be adding more than one fakevolume - Have a mechanism so an addon can do things on system suspend/resume; such as saving/restoring the backlight value (macbook, macbookpro, omap, dell addon's) Optimization ------------ - Port hal daemon core to use dbus glib bindings - One proxy per hal device object - hal device object is an GObject - wants to export multiple D-Bus interfaces for a single GObject - for some interfaces... need/want to handle all messages on myself (for forwarding to addons) - ie. need to partipate in Introspection() on "DBusGProxy" stuff - Linux: Optionally drop sysfs coldplug code - for starting up before udev and piggy tailing on udev's coldplug code - Performance! Profile and optimize! Too big of a task to describe in one bullet. Feel free to provide patches to this file to break it up after some analysis. External projects: ------------------ - We need to finish PolicyKit, at least get 0.3 out (in Spring 2007) and work on bringing it to 1.0 rather fast (ideally before Fall 2007). - Runtime power management in the kernel. This is still ongoing and AFAIK there is no concrete idea about the user space interface. Once the user space interface is set in stone we can easily export this via HAL for selective suspend and/or tuning of knobs.