Hardware Database (WAS Re: RH recommends using Windows? plus a Question!)

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 21:32, Maxwell Kanat-Alexander wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 03:47, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > May I propose to use the freedesktop.org HAL I'm working on? This
> > project is supposed to be a database of all hardware on the system, see
> > 
> >  http://freedesktop.org/~hal/spec-0.2-pre/hal-spec.html
> 
> 	This sounds like just what I was looking for. Is this data going to be
> held centrally by freedesktop.org, or is it going to be in a distributed
> tool?
> 

Oh that's a really good question. HAL is a quite new initiative so right
now the focus have only been on what is stored on the desktop system and
how desktop applications access it. 

There's been quite a lot of discussion on the xdg-list about the device
information file format (I call them .fdi files - for Free Device
Information) and the conclusion was that these files will be XML and
resemble the Progeny discover file format with few changes. The
conclusion was also that for every device a .fdi file is nice to have
since it's difficult to know what capabilities a device got.

Now, it would be really cool to have deployable software for driving
this database that you are suggesting along with a web service or HTTP
interface that desktop applications can access so people can download
the .fdi files and/or required OS packages with driver software etc.

Deployment-wise freedesktop.org could possibly host a database, the
Fedora project could host one and maybe, someday, hardware vendors
and/or OEM's could host one.

Thanks,
David