hal’s day of reckoning

I have been waiting for this for about a year and half now, and today, finally, I get this on my Arch system.

Since around November 2008 I have had the singular displeasure of heaping blame upon hal whenever something went southward in a system I built. Forgetting to start it up has killed more installations and caused more filesystem errors than I can count. Just managing an international keyboard with hal was an exercise in relearning everything about X-and-company.

Not that there’s much to love in Xorg in the first place, but dealing with hal as an intermediary ranks near the bottom on my all-time least favorite things to do. Somewhere around “walking barefoot on broken glass” and “getting a root canal.”

I for one welcome our new udev overlords. I can’t be sure at this early date that things will be better than they were with hal, but I am reasonably confident that they won’t be worse. 👿

P.S.: This Arch wiki page may be very important to you.