Regardless of my opinion in HAL and friends (this opinion is not very good), I see it already becoming de facto standard. More and more features in modern desktops - gnome, kde, xorg (yeah, xorg itself as well) - depend on it.
Thanks to Jared D. McNeill who imported hal into pkgsrc to make it work in NetBSD, I could commit my work to make it work in DragonFly (with FreeBSD backend) as well so it's available for others in sysutils/hal. Current pkgsrc HEAD has all my patches in and you need latest DragonFly HEAD to compile it. So, this is call for testing/improving the stuff. If you are interested in it, please test, report problems and most importantly - try to fix them ;). Jared D. McNeill is also busy adding hal dependency to Gnome packages in pkgsrc HEAD, btw. happy hacking, -- Hasso Tepper
