Description of problem: We need to move haldaemon earlier in the startup process so that it is available for NetworkManager, among other things. However, once you do this, acpid will fail to start, as hald has grabbed the socket first. (Yay for crappy kernel interfaces).
Yes, I know about it. One way is that we add a similar code as HAL has. I mean something like this: acpid try to connect directly to the kernel interface. If it isn't possible, then acpid will start listening on some HAL unix socket. HAL has same behavior. But I don't know if HAL create an unix socket like acpid does.
Not sure why we want to still ship acpid. Either way, hal will try to connect to acpid if the kernel interface can't be opened. Maybe it requires an extra configure option to hald; you can test this yourself with f9 builds by shutting down hald, starting acpid and then starting hald. Then do a 'ps aux|grep hald' and the process line will tell if you if the hal acpi addon listens to acpid. See http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal.git;a=blob;h=de49c80ecd0dfcb3b5b49ed00c857b1f8210c131;hb=72c7ebedcdd5ebcf4784ff406b4ffc98a97cb4d6;f=hald/linux/addons/addon-acpi.c for details, in particular search for "listening". HTH.
Seems the simplest way for now is to move acpid earlier, to match HAL. Done in 1.0.6-7.fc9.
Closing.