On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 08:18:18PM -0400, JeremyBekka C wrote:
> > 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

Hal is used "for DRM", which in the context of Flash and the period
of development almost certainly is "Digital 'Rights' Management".
I would presume from the fact that one can load the flashplayer
without it that the library is dlopen'd.

I've looked at https://github.com/cshorler/hal-flash, and here's what
I can make out:
- This version uses dbus to connect to udisks2 for everything it
doesn't stub out. I guess glib is used extensively.
- Answers the following "property strings" for devices in
libhal_device_get_property_string():
system.hardware.serial, storage.bus, storage.serial
In libhal_device_get_property_uint64(), only storage.size is answered.
In libhal_manager_find_device_string_match(), a query about
key "storage.drive_type", value "disk", returns a list of hard drives.
storage.bus seems to be more-or-less "ata", NULL, or ...
something else, I don't know what.
I'm not sure if storage.size is free space or total size, but it's
an unsigned 64-bit value.

The system serial numbers are stored in
/sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/*_serial
but are chmod 0400 (readable only to root).

libhal_device_get_property_{int,double}() are stubs.

HTH,
Isaac Dunham