Please drop hal dependency

Martin and I talked about it. The proposed idea of making 'hal' a
'Suggests' and conditionally enabling the hardware plugin if HAL is
available sounds like the best path forward until we have the time to
migrate to something better (udev, for example).

<jkakar> pitti: We're just talking about what to do about the HAL dependency in landscape-client.
 Re: bug #708502
<ubottu> Launchpad bug 708502 in landscape-client (Ubuntu) "Please drop hal dependency" [High,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/708502
<jkakar> pitti: We don't really have the time/capacity to migrate to udev right now.
 pitti: We're wondering about making hal a 'Suggests', so that the client can be installed without it, and making some tweaks to the code so it won't blow up if HAL isn't there.
 pitti: The question is, will the hal package be moving to universe?
<pitti> jkakar: I was actually quite surprised that it still used it; I thought we already talked about it many years ago
 jkakar: I hope that we can move it to universe in natty or n+1
<jkakar> pitti: We did, we just haven't made time for it... too many bigger fires to deal with. :(
<persia> Riddell, Looks like upstream 1.1 is out, but still has the dependency on HAL, and I don't see any halsectomy related items on the 1.2 roadmap. qtmobility can be compiled to not use HAL, with "reduced functionality". I don't know of anyone actively using these APIs though, so I'd be tempted to compile with the reduced functionality (unless you know a user my apt-cache isn't finding).
<jkakar> pitti: Okay, so there's a chance it won't make it for natty.
<pitti> persia: it's not a compile-time thing; it only talks to the dbus interface
<persia> pitti, Is there a reason to move to universe, or can we just drop it?
<jkakar> pitti: I guess very few packages actually use it, right?
<pitti> persia: i. e. simply runtime
<persia> pitti, There's a compile-time option to tell it not to ask DBus about HAL.
 (or else I'm reading the docs wrong)
<pitti> jkakar: it's qtmobility and landscape-client, the rest was fixed or will be in the next days
<pitti> persia: right, but ideally it would just fail gracefully if hal isn't running (I haven't checked)
<pitti> jkakar: out of interest, what do you use it for?
<jkakar> I suppose one option for us is to make hal a Suggests and do a conditional import... if hal is unavailable (because the package is gone entirely) the hardware inventory will be simply unavailable.
 pitti: We pull the entire HAL device tree and send it to the server. We provide a view of that data to our users.
<pitti> jkakar: is that merely for display purposes, or do you actually do something with the data?
<jkakar> pitti: Honestly, the functionality we have isn't so useful.
 pitti: Merely for display purposes.
 pitti: But we don't have the time to replace it with something better right now, so we're trying to figure out how to keep it working if possible.
<pitti> jkakar: the hal tree is by and large the sysfs tree
<jkakar> pitti: True.
<pitti> an udevadm info --export-db usually gives enough info about the hardware, at least in the bugs that I am looking into
<jkakar> pitti: One issue is that udev provides really crappy data on <lucid.
...

Hey Martin,

> There are gobject-introspection bindings for gudev these days

Are you talking about the python-gudev package? Do you think it would be possible to move it to main?

No, python-gudev was a temporary hack. The current method to do Python bindings is via gobject-introspection (http://live.gnome.org
/GObjectIntrospection), like this:

sudo apt-get install gir1.2-gudev-1.0

python
>>> from gi.repository import GUdev
>>> client = GUdev.Client.new(['usb'])
>>> devs = client.query_by_subsystem('block')
>>> devs[0].get_name()
'sda'
>>> devs[0].get_property('ID_MODEL')
'SAMSUNG_MMCRE28G8MXP-0VBL1'

I. e. it uses the very same API as the C one, so you can use the existing documentation (via devhelp, or http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/gudev/).

Thanks for the precision. Is it same to assume that it only works on natty and forward? gir1.0-gudev-1.0 doesn't seem to provide the same functionality.

Note that unfortunately this only works in current natty (udev >= 165-0ubuntu2), as in earlier versions the GI typelib file was broken due to a build error. So if you need something that works the same across all supported releases, I suggest "udevadm info --export-db".

This bug was fixed in the package landscape-client - 11.02-0ubuntu0.11.04.0

---------------
landscape-client (11.02-0ubuntu0.11.04.0) natty; urgency=low

  * New upstream version (LP: #727324)

    - Exit gracefully instead of crashing when the filesystem is
      read-only (LP: #649997).

    - Drop hal requirement (LP: #708502).

    - Enable HTTP compression in Curl (LP: #297623).

    - Explicitly name log files that need to be rotated (LP: #634236).

    - Assorted test suite fixes
 -- Andreas Hasenack <email address hidden> Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:38:11 -0300

Awesome, thank you! With that upload, hal can go to universe.

Accepted landscape-client into lucid-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

Accepted landscape-client into maverick-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

Accepted landscape-client into karmic-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

Accepted landscape-client into lucid-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

Accepted landscape-client into karmic-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

This package has been in karmic-proposed for some time without verification. I removed it as karmic is end-of-life now.

Verified fixed for maverick and lucid in the landscape-client proposed packages:
- 11.02-0ubuntu0.10.04.1
- 11.02-0ubuntu0.10.10.1

This bug was fixed in the package landscape-client - 11.02-0ubuntu0.10.10.1

---------------
landscape-client (11.02-0ubuntu0.10.10.1) maverick-proposed; urgency=low

  * debian/control, debian/rules: Add quilt
  * debian/patches/fix-landscape-monitor.patch: Fix landscape
    monitoring with gir1.0-gudev-1.0 installed. (LP: #747498)

landscape-client (11.02-0ubuntu0.10.10.0) maverick-proposed; urgency=low

  * New upstream version (LP: #727324)

    - Exit gracefully instead of crashing when the filesystem is
      read-only (LP: #649997).

    - Drop hal requirement (LP: #708502).

    - Enable HTTP compression in Curl (LP: #297623).

    - Explicitly name log files that need to be rotated (LP: #634236).

    - Assorted test suite fixes

    - Use a better load check for the sysinfo wrapper, taking into account the
      number of cores (LP: #643565).

    - Add an option to bootstrap cloud instances using cloud-init
      (LP: #701972).

    - Fix packaging for Natty (LP: #688115).

    - Force deletion of all the persist data for the monitoring plugins at
      resynchronization, instead of relying each one of them to do
      (LP: #688161).

    - Don't send the mount-activity message to the server anymore
      (LP: #688514).

    - Workaround a new behavior in NetworkManager where getfqdn would report
      localhost instead of useful hostname (LP: #649142).

landscape-client (1.5.5.1-0ubuntu0.10.10.0) maverick; urgency=low

  * The client network plugin would send erroneous data if a network
    interface was removed (and its kernel module removed as well) and
    then readded (LP: #641264).
 -- Chuck Short <email address hidden> Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:56:38 -0400

This bug was fixed in the package landscape-client - 11.02-0ubuntu0.10.04.1

---------------
landscape-client (11.02-0ubuntu0.10.04.1) lucid-proposed; urgency=low

  * debian/control, debian/rules: Add quilt
  * debian/patches/fix-landscape-monitor.patch: Fix landscape:
    monitoring with gir1.0-gudev-1.0 installed. (LP: #747498)

landscape-client (11.02-0ubuntu0.10.04.0) lucid-proposed; urgency=low

  * New upstream version (LP: #727324)

    - Exit gracefully instead of crashing when the filesystem is
      read-only (LP: #649997).

    - Drop hal requirement (LP: #708502).

    - Enable HTTP compression in Curl (LP: #297623).

    - Explicitly name log files that need to be rotated (LP: #634236).

    - Assorted test suite fixes

    - Use a better load check for the sysinfo wrapper, taking into account the
      number of cores (LP: #643565).

    - Add an option to bootstrap cloud instances using cloud-init
      (LP: #701972).

    - Fix packaging for Natty (LP: #688115).

    - Force deletion of all the persist data for the monitoring plugins at
      resynchronization, instead of relying each one of them to do
      (LP: #688161).

    - Don't send the mount-activity message to the server anymore
      (LP: #688514).

    - Workaround a new behavior in NetworkManager where getfqdn would report
      localhost instead of useful hostname (LP: #649142).
 -- Chuck Short <email address hidden> Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:38:20 -0400