HAL & udev 181-2: rule issues? long term plans for HAL & impact on TDE?

Guys, I don't know if this is worth looking into from a TDE standpoint or if it is still relevant, but HAL and udev stopped the boot process on my Arch box today. Calvin had the issue that I believe he solved by removing an offending udev rule[1]. That raised the question to me whether there is some standardization that HAL will require across distros in order to support TDE or if there is some part of udev that is needed to support HAL? Arch no longer provides HAL as a standard package. I believe what triggered the boot fail today was the loss of the 'udev-compat' package (unconfirmed). I'm still digging into this, but if HAL will be required for TDE, then should we look into either insuring that a generic HAL version that is compatible with upstream udev is available to the project? I don't know how HAL + udev affect TDE or what the long term thoughts are on either, but I thought I would raise the issues to those smarter than I am in case there is a looming issue coming down the road. What say the experts? Is there any issue with HAL + udev on TDE, or is it just a matter of the individual distro TDE builders to sort out? What worries me is Arch no longer packages HAL and the version we have in the user supported repository (done by 'l0ner' -- thank you!) is hal 0.5.14-7 with a *900K patch* file. If this is where all the distros are ultimately going, we may be better served by deciding how to handle it now rather than waiting until we run into build problems later... Footnote [1]: (which we are still trying to determine exactly what he removed :) -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.