Re: CD writing in future Linux (stirring up a hornets' nest)

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Kyle Moffett wrote:

> On Jan 30, 2006, at 17:52, Bill Davidsen wrote:
>
>> What is not easily available in Linux is a nice single place to  find 
>> out what mass storage (disk/optical/floppy/ZIP/LS120/tape)  devices 
>> are on the system, and what the system calls them.
>
>
> Yes it is available, and a whole slew of GUI applications use it.   
> It's called "hal", or Hardware Abstraction Layer, and it has small  
> hooks into udev and a bit of sysfs code so that it has a list of all  
> devices of various types and knows what their associated udev-created  
> device nodes are.  This means that I can configure udev to put my CD  
> drive on /dev/burner and correctly written GUI programs will just  
> find it and work.

I was really talking about something stable. HAL is an application, and 
as such has to be changed avery time some developer has a bad dream and 
changes the interface, moves a comtrol or report from /proc to /sys, or 
otherwise requires a new way of interpreting the data. If you will, HAL 
*in* the kernel where it must work.

> -- 
> I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you  
> looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
>   -- Poul Anderson

-- 

bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979