Moving libsolid-hal to unmaintained?

[todd rme]

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 3:10 AM, Alex Fiestas <afiestas at kde.org> wrote:
> Hello everybody!
>
> I'm doing some bug triage on libsolid (as well of some bug fixing) and I'm
> finding that most "nasty" bugs are fault of our HAL backend (or HAL itself).
>
> I tried to build HAL and failed on it (easy fix though) but that made me
> realize that there is no point of me fixing HAL issues on Linux because nobody
> will actually use my fixes since I will be fixing bugs using HAL-Linux not
> HAL-bsd or HAL-XXX (where we have actual users of this backend).
>
> So real question is, who is using libsolid-hal nowdays?
>
> Once we know the answer to that question I will:
> -Make HAL backend option only available on those platforms.
> -Move libsolid-hal either to unmaintained or to a new maintainer.
>
> Even though I will be having more KDE time from now on, I don't see a reason
> why I shuold maintain this backend, I know how it works (ervin does as well)
> so if a new maintainer step up we can mentor and help him/her.
>
> If nobody replies in a few days I will go ahead and move libsolid-hal to
> unmantained.
>
> Also, in the extreme case that nobody cares about it (no platforms interested
> on HAL) I will remove the backend on frameworks branch and the backend will
> not be ported to libsolid2.
>
> Cheers !

Is there a way to have it so HAL is enabled by default on BSD systems,
but on Linux systems you need to manually use a cmake flag to enable
it?

Also, for 4.8.x, is it safe to not build HAL support on linux distros
that don't use it?  Is there any cost to having HAL support enabled if
it isn't used?

-Todd