Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 05:40:50 +1000
From: Zenaan Harkness <zen@...edbms.net>
To: xvendor@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Fwd: RFC: Free Software Hardware Compatibility - Centralised DB

On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 00:15, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> A quick comment, I think the HAL project needs to be involved here. HAL
> is intended to be cross-UNIX-platform (cover BSD, Linux, Solaris, etc.)
> 
> http://freedesktop.org/Software/hal

Yes, thanks - I have been subscribed to HAL now since May 29,
just lurking so far.

A couple of key extracts from some other discussions (primarily with
some Debian folk who are undecided about whether to do something by
themselves or support a community-wide project):

--- extract:
Manual submissions (ie. just an email address/ nice web pages):

* Manual submission will produce better submissions (the hwdb team
can engage the submitter where required (perhaps nearly always) to
try to get more and better information.

* As we build the DB, manual submissions will give us the scope to
easily and readily modify/ fine-tune the schema as needed.

* The submission interface will never be broken, incomplete or
"down for maintenance" since it's just "send us an email".

* We can launch immediately, and with a robust interface.
Ie. we won't waste time having to get the software right
before we are able to launch.

* A robust submission interface is particularly important for
manufacturers - being the primary target here (in my mind) we want
to _never_ waste their time and _always_ have submissions working.

* No elitism over whether we use PHP or Python, GTK or QT
(OK, that's probably stretching it a bit :)

--- extract:
I have four offers of hosting for my project thus far, and given
no reasons not to start, I shall do so in the next few days.

The project, in summary, is as follows:

* Provide a single point of contact for hardware manufacturers,
resellers, end users, distribution and driver developers to
submit hardware information regarding how hardware devices
relate to various free software projects, be they kernels,
operating systems/ distributions, drivers, support libraries,
etc.

* The key focii of the project are:
 - hardware manufacturers
 - single point of contact
 - free software (superset of DFSG, FSF/GNU, OSI)
 - neutrality

---
I guess now is as good a time as any - I shall send a couple
of emails to get some feedback from the HAL list now too.

Thanks for the feedback
Zenaan

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