On Xorg and HAL
Recently there's been a bit of a fuzz about the fact that the xorg folks have introduced HAL as a requirement for X. I understand this is to make things easier.
So instead of configuring stuff through /etc/X11/xorg.conf, you now have to configure things through /etc/X11/xorg.conf, /etc/hal/whatever, and /etc/default/console-setup. In three completely and utterly different syntaxes, no less (xorg.conf format, XML, and shell script). How exactly this is 'easier' escapes me.
I presume this makes life easier for those multiseatcomputer folks; but for those of us with a normal computer, it doesn't, really.
Oh well.
You seem to have misunderstood. You delete /etc/X11/xorg.conf, edit /etc/default/console-setup for the basic keyboard mapping, and everything else happens via HAL, which you can control if you have to. For most people, X configuration is now simply dpkg-reconfigure console-setup -- the same command that also configures the console.
Please re-read http://wiki.debian.org/XStrikeForce/InputHotplugGuide and try not to increase the FUD. Maybe it's not ideal yet, but blog posts like yours hardly help to improve the situation.
It's all about hotplugging external input devices. And rather than doing this in X, this information should be in HAL. That way other applications can also use that information, along with other hardware information.
And ideally, you wouldn't have to configure anything (we'll get there), but we do gain a lot of power and flexibility.
So in all, your rant is a bit moot, if you ask me :-).
Well, there are two levels of complexity. One is for the end users. I agree that it gets more complex here.
The other one is the one explained in the InputHotplug documentation they put onto the wiki, i.e. it makes coding easier and takes out complexity out of Xorg. I think we should wait until we can really judge the (possibly negative) impact of this.
the biggest "+1" ever!!! you took the words out of my mouth^Wfingers
I makes a lot of sense to config the keyboard in console-setup, since the keyboard is hardly an X-specific device. Things that are X-specific go in xorg.conf.
It seems to me that the idea of changing things in hal fdi files is a bit of a red herring; I don't see that it is needed except in some pretty unusual situations, and unusual situations that required hal tweaking also exist outside the realm of xorg/console configuration.