After an upgrade to intrepid, HAL prefers old fdi-cache to new FDI files

Riddell adds:

<Riddell> bryce: keyboard is just a laptop one, I also plugged in a hal one and restarted X
<bryce> Riddell: well, in general upgrades to intrepid don't lose the keyboard like this normally, so there is something unusual about your system
 Riddell: it looks like the touchpad got detected okay; I assume that works?
<Riddell> bryce: yes the touchpad worked, nothing unusal it's an HP laptop and it works fine from a fresh install. I also deleted the xorg.conf and restarted X but no difference

From IRC it sounds like this is a hal caching issue:

<ion_> pitti: I was told to bug you about this. After an upgrade from a fresh hardy installation to intrepid, HAL had old information in /var/cache/hald/fdi-cache. It only stat()d most of the FDI files without opening them, and never took /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-x11-input.fdi into account, which caused X not to find any input devices. I renamed the cache file away and everything works now.

Oh, it just occurred to me that a time-based stat() comparison is doomed to fail. dpkg preserves the timestamps of files, so if you install a new package which ships an FDI file, hal won't pick it up immediately. Worse though, even rebooting won't help.

I think the best thing we can do is to nuke the cache in the hal init script, before starting it.

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/hal/ubuntu/revision/262

This bug was fixed in the package hal - 0.5.11-3~ubuntu10

---------------
hal (0.5.11-3~ubuntu10) intrepid; urgency=low

  [ Martin Pitt ]
  * debian/hal.init: Remove the FDI cache before startup. dpkg preserves
    original timestamps of unpacked fdi files in packages, so changes in those
    will never get picked up on upgrade, not even after a reboot.
    (LP: #275825)

  [ Michael Bienia ]
  * Add debian/patches/06_smart_card_readers_acl.patch:
    Grant access to the currently logged-in user on some SCM smart-card
    readers (LP: #57755). This should improve the out-of-box support for
    OpenGPG card users.

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:16:53 +0200

seems, this bug has been 'unfixed' in hal 0.5.11-4ubuntu4

I did report it in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hal/+bug/304793

For me it seems, a dpkg trigger isn't the appropriate way, as a future timestamped fdi-cache would only be deleted on a package upgrade or by hand. The init script at least should check for 'uncommon' timestamp on fdi-cache and delete it in that case ...

regards,
tom

Right, thanks z3non. I'll handle this in bug 304793.