[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#792398: Bug#792398: hald fails to start

[Karsten Sperling]

Hi Michael,

I've put together a patch that gets hald working on Jessie. "udevadm info
-r" is no longer supported in udev >= 186 because the /dev directory is
hard-coded to /dev from that version onwards. The patch calls udevadm
--version to check for this.

I also had to update debian/hal.dirs to create
/etc/hal/fdi/{preprobe,information} to get hald to start out of the box
(plus I installed the hal-info package from wheezy).

With these packages installed Flash DRM video plays successfully in
Iceweasel via flashplugin-nonfree. This can be tested via an Adobe test
page (instructions on
https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/protected-video-content-play.html)

I don't know if it's feasible to add the hal packages back into Jessie for
this use-case (I suspect everybody is happy to be rid of it); is it
possible to deploy these to some sort of backports / contrib / ugly
repository?

Now that I've got it running (and my family can watch on demand TV again
;-) I might have a look if I can trace how the flash plugin is interacting
with HAL and if it's possible to stub out the relevant calls somehow via
either a fake hal service or client library. I've CCed in Bart Martens in
case he has any thoughts on this issue? It would be nice if DRM video in
flashplugin-nonfree would "just work" for normal users without having to
install a custom HAL build by hand.

Cheers, Karsten


On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 1:43 AM, Karsten Sperling <karsten at sperling.co.nz>
wrote:

> I don't know what exactly it's actually used for, but it's referenced here
> for example:
>
> https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1039743?start=0&tstart=0
>
> Essentially, NPAPI Flash will remain at version 11.x with security updates
> only, so they won't update it to remove the HAL dependency.
> Later versions are PPAPI only and shipped with Chrome only.
>
> I might try building HAL from source and see if I can work around that
> udevadm issue.
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 1:12 AM, Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org> wrote:
>
>> Am 14.07.2015 um 15:10 schrieb Karsten Sperling:
>> > Thanks for the quick reply. That's unfortunate, as HAL is still
>> required by
>> > the Adobe Flash plugin for playing DRM-protected video.
>>
>> Wow, why the heck do they need hal for that which has been removed from
>> basically every distro out there?
>>
>>
>> --
>> Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the
>> universe are pointed away from Earth?
>>
>>
>
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