Free Software. Free Speech. That’s the way it works.
The patch you submitted has 0 chance of getting applied, and you know it. It’s nothing more than a bad joke.
The best solution for this issue is most probably to provide a xserver-xorg-nohal package that is a duplicate of xserver-xorg minus the HAL dependency.
Don’t like HAL? X.org now forces it upon you via xserver-xorg.
#515214, currently wishlist/wontfix.
From the Bits from the Debian Installer team mail to d-d-a:
It has been decided that, in order to not slow down the development processes, D-I SVN should be branched when the work on preparing a release starts. Even if SVN doesn’t make the process very easy, changing the VCS we use is currently not an option we prefer.
SVN, branching, d-i. There’s no word to describe how painful it is to work on d-i using SVN. d-i is big, SVN is slow in about everything it does. Now add branches to the mix.
That mail left me very disappointed; first because I thought switching to git was sort-of planned for after the release of Lenny, and now it’s off the table, second because some things in this mail are just wrong.
Oh well. No d-i for me, I guess, then.