mountmgr.sys: start detecting USB devices

[Damjan Jovanovic]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 1:45 PM, Maarten Lankhorst
<m.b.lankhorst at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Damjan,
>
> Op 02-03-11 18:52, Damjan Jovanovic schreef:
>>
>> Changelog:
>> * mountmgr.sys: start detecting USB devices
>
> I'd love to get this kind of work in, but since libhal has been deprecated
> for a while, wouldn't it be better to use libudev directly instead of
> expanding our usage of libhal?
>
> Cheers,
> Maarten
>

Hi Maarten

I see the deprecation of HAL as a major loss for everybody. HAL was
the one piece of software that worked on multiple *nixes and allowed a
portable way for software to detect hardware and read hardware
properties. HAL's replacements, like udev, have deteriorated to being
100% Linux-only: if we go that way we'll eventually end up detecting
hardware using OS-specific code on each OS [1][2].

If HAL is not acceptable for detecting USB devices, then I'd rather
use only libusb to do it, instead of hacking support for each
operating system in its own way.

Regards
Damjan

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/DeviceKit ("On Linux, ...
On other platforms, native hardware enumeration systems should be
used").
[2] eg. DragonFlyBSD only has vague plans to port DeviceKit:
http://bugs.dragonflybsd.org/issue1477