HALectomy

general

All bugs not specific to a single DE:

hal-less KDE

KDE uses Solid as abstraction for hardware access, which in turn currently uses HAL as backend for hardware listing and power management. This means, porting away from HAL needs to be done only in two places major places:

KDE >= 4.6 (so kde4libs and kdebase-workspace) ships components no more using HAL on Linux by default; about non-Linux architetures provided in Debian, kde4libs will still need HAL.

KDE SC 4.4 (squeeze) definitely relies on HAL for all of them.

hal-less Xfce

See:

hal-less LXDE

LXDE uses HAL to support volume management, and power management. Porting away from HAL need to be done only in two places:

hal-less GNOME for squeeze

Related links:

Packages in the default GNOME installation

libgnomevfs2-0 / libgnomeui-0 / libgnome2-0 cleanup

A lot of packages indirectly depend on libhal1 by either depending on libgnomevfs2-0 (~185 packages), libgnomeui-0 (~173 packages) or libgnome2-0 (~208 packages). It would be worth investigating, if that is due to broken pkg-config files resp. libtool dragging in unnecessary library dependencies. Such pkg-config files should be identified and dependend packages could be binNMUed. Packages still using the old libraries should be identified and bugs filed respectively to port them e.g. to GVfs. See also the upstream Project Ridley.

An alternative would be to build libgnomevfs2-0 without HAL support. The impact of --disable-hal would need to be investigated. Joss suggests to grep for gnome_vfs_volume_monitor in ELF files.

gnome-mount

PolicyKit 1 (done \o/)