# dbus, hal, what is is crap?

## ens_leader

Ok, I've been running gentoo for a couple years now. Recently I had to change a use flag for a certain application. The use flag was called Dbus... I looked it up, its a app messaging bus.... All of a sudden, if I add it to my USE flags, gentoo wants to install all this additional crap: HAL, device-mapper, etc. etc.

My question is, I've been using gentoo for all these years and never had a need for this crap. Is it really necessary? I have an idea of what it does but why would I need a HAL if I've been not  using one all these years... Whats the deal?

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## Carnildo

dbus and HAL work together to let you do things like automounting of CDs and USB drives, autoplay of CDs, and the like.  For example, on my system, if I plug my digital camera into a USB port, HAL will use dbus to notify KDE of this, and KDE will ask me if I want to download the pictures with Digikam, mount the camera as a disk drive, or ignore the whole matter.

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## i92guboj

 *ens_leader wrote:*   

> Ok, I've been running gentoo for a couple years now. Recently I had to change a use flag for a certain application. The use flag was called Dbus... I looked it up, its a app messaging bus.... All of a sudden, if I add it to my USE flags, gentoo wants to install all this additional crap: HAL, device-mapper, etc. etc.
> 
> My question is, I've been using gentoo for all these years and never had a need for this crap. Is it really necessary? I have an idea of what it does but why would I need a HAL if I've been not  using one all these years... Whats the deal?

 

The answer is in your own question: you are installing something that needs dbus, hence, you need dbus if you want to use that application.

If you let us know what this "certain application" is, we might have (or not) a way to recompile that application without dbus/hal support.

Also, how did you enable that use flag? To reduce the deps to a minimum, enable dbus only for that concrete package, instead of doing it globally. Settings in /etc/make.conf are global. Settings in /etc/portage/package.use are local to the desired package.

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