[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#724963: hal: lshal is completely dysfunctional

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Package: hal
Version: 0.5.14-8
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

I've only noticed this late last week after my weekly Monday morning
update of jessie but the lshal command has become dysfunctional.

When I try to execute lshal, there is no reply for a while (about 25
seconds) and then it reports.

  $ lshal
  *** [DIE] lshal.c:dump_devices():285 : Couldn't obtain list of devices

A second attempt after this returns the same error message immediately.

A glance through my /var/log/syslog shows:

  Sep 30 10:57:14 $hostname dbus[3525]: [system] Activating service name='org.freedesktop.Hal' (using servicehelper)
  Sep 30 10:57:14 $hostname acpid: client connected from 10344[108:114]
  Sep 30 10:57:14 $hostname acpid: 1 client rule loaded
  Sep 30 10:57:39 $hostname dbus[3525]: [system] Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.Hal': timed out
  Sep 30 10:58:03 $hostname dbus[3525]: [system] Activating service name='org.freedesktop.Hal' (using servicehelper)
  Sep 30 10:58:03 $hostname dbus[3525]: [system] Activated service 'org.freedesktop.Hal' failed: Launch helper exited with unknown return code 1

Also, before the first invocation, hald is not running.  Before the
second invocation it is.

My prime interest is not lshal itself but custom software that uses
libhal to access information that is also shown by lshal.  Judging from
the above, I would think that everything that still uses HAL may be
affected.

FWIW (and unrelated to hal), I've also seen an attempt to activate the
org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit service time out once.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.10-3-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages hal depends on:
ii  adduser           3.113+nmu3
ii  dbus              1.6.14-1
ii  hal-info          20091130-1
ii  libblkid1         2.20.1-5.5
ii  libc6             2.17-92+b1
ii  libdbus-1-3       1.6.14-1
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2  0.100.2-1
ii  libexpat1         2.1.0-4
ii  libglib2.0-0      2.36.4-1
ii  libhal-storage1   0.5.14-8
ii  libhal1           0.5.14-8
ii  libusb-0.1-4      2:0.1.12-23.2
ii  lsb-base          4.1+Debian12
ii  mount             2.20.1-5.5
ii  pciutils          1:3.2.0-3
ii  udev              204-5
ii  usbutils          1:007-2

Versions of packages hal recommends:
ii  consolekit  0.4.6-3+b1
ii  eject       2.1.5+deb1+cvs20081104-13
ii  pm-utils    1.4.1-11

hal suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information

-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2           FLOSS Engineer -- AVASYS CORPORATION
FSF Associate Member #1962               Help support software freedom
                 http://www.fsf.org/jf?referrer=1962