Hi Jeremy,

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 8:18 PM, JeremyBekka C <jrchristophel@???>
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
>
>
> 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.
>

I don't know enough yet about why Amazon's DRM regime requires libhal and
hal. A bit of googling on the train this morning suggests that Adobe flash
player (the old unsupported one) needs it for some reason. I'm not sure
why, though--I looked at the symbol table and linkage tables of the
libflashplayer.so library, and didn't see any references to libhal or even
dbus.

Again, my main goal with vdev is udev compatibility, not necessarily hal
compatibility. If the requisite functions from hal made it into udev, then
it would be something I would work on as part of vdev's release. If not,
then it's outside my scope, and would be a separate project.

In the mean time, it looks like someone else has done the legwork to make
hal installable without breaking the things that replaced it:
https://launchpad.net/~mjblenner/+archive/ubuntu/ppa-hal

Hope this helps,
-Jude