On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 21:32, Maxwell Kanat-Alexander wrote:
On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 03:47, David Zeuthen wrote:
May I propose to use the freedesktop.org HAL I'm working on? This project is supposed to be a database of all hardware on the system, see
This sounds like just what I was looking for. Is this data going to be held centrally by freedesktop.org, or is it going to be in a distributed tool?
Oh that's a really good question. HAL is a quite new initiative so right now the focus have only been on what is stored on the desktop system and how desktop applications access it.
There's been quite a lot of discussion on the xdg-list about the device information file format (I call them .fdi files - for Free Device Information) and the conclusion was that these files will be XML and resemble the Progeny discover file format with few changes. The conclusion was also that for every device a .fdi file is nice to have since it's difficult to know what capabilities a device got.
Now, it would be really cool to have deployable software for driving this database that you are suggesting along with a web service or HTTP interface that desktop applications can access so people can download the .fdi files and/or required OS packages with driver software etc.
Deployment-wise freedesktop.org could possibly host a database, the Fedora project could host one and maybe, someday, hardware vendors and/or OEM's could host one.
Thanks, David