Hi Jeremy,

I have a question about the deprecated program hal. We like to stream
> videos from Amazon.com but we need hal installed in order to make it work.
> The Hal Debian wiki says that it is being deprecated and it is being
> replaced by udev (https://wiki.debian.org/hal). Since vdev is being
> written to replace udev, are there any plans to incorperate hal's functions
> into vdev or keep maintaining it seperaratly?
>

Do you know what specific functions of hal you need? Hal's functionality
got split between udisks/udisks2, upower, and udev some time ago. Things
like device plug state, device properties, and device capabilities are now
tracked by udev (in /run/udev) and accessed by libudev, for example. My
goal for vdev is to be compatible with udev, so if you can use udev today,
you should be able to use vdev when it's ready.

Thanks,
Jude


As James Powwle pointed out, I need the function of hal that deals with DRM
on the Amazon videos. Since I have udev installed and Amazon videos do not
play without hal, does that must mean that udev is not responsible for DRM?
If so, then I misunderstood the point of the hal wiki because I thought the
functions of hal were included in udev. This would then seem to indicate to
me that udisks/udisks2 or upower should have taken over the DRM function of
hal, but that does not seem to be the case.

My question is then, would it be possible to get the DRM functionality of
hal in vdev or one of the other programs? If so, how could that be
accomplished? I would like to not have to depend on a deprecated program if
I don't need to.