Re: [gpm] Re: Gnome 2.16 Module Proposal: GNOME Power Manager

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 17:45 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Now, that's a slightly separate problem - that is, the fact that most 
> DBus applications are focused on the "User logged in" case. David 
> Zeuthen's been working on that, and I think there's a more elegant 
> solution than "Run as root, and fall back to a default policy if there's 
> no client".

Yea, I should be able to finish this (PolicyKit etc) soon and then g-p-m
can run even when no user is logged in. When we're there we can do other
stuff such as

 - Integrate with g-d-m so you can get a power icon

 - Make a "Make these settings system-wide" button in the gnome
   power preferences that uses PolicyKit to auth

and other exciting stuff.

I think it's just crazy talk to propose yet another daemon running as
root just to solve the not-so-interesting edge case of enforcing policy
when no one is logged in. Btw, I've suggested to some NetworkManager
developers to behave more like gnome-power-manager (so we don't need a
NetworkManager daemon running as root and an ugly split into system and
session daemon) and they liked it. I've been wanting to propose this on
the NM list but I've been very busy with other stuff.

So, I don't really think it's interesting for g-p-m to add a whole new
dependency on Powersave; of course, distributors can do whatever they
want (and they do) but sooner or later their solution will be replaced
with something that GNOME includes and then they need to make the switch
and/or maintain patches to use the foreign solution. We've did this with
removable media and we've made progress because most distributors use
the same solution. 

This shouldn't be news to any distributor, I just want to make the
important point that it's better for all of us to solve these problems
once and for all upstream rather than spending lots of energy for
temporary solutions that make distro XYZ only a bit better (*cough*
Ubuntu *cough*, though Fedora and SUSE is also guilty of this in other
matters I suppose). I just wish more people would "get this"; doing your
development upstream so it's suitable for all distributions (and
operating systems) is just much more important than most people realize.

I agree it's worthwhile renaming g-p-m's session bus interface from
org.gnome.PowerManager to org.freedesktop.PowerManager after discussion
and review on xdg-list. Richard, you should raise this on
xdg-list freedesktop org  describing what the interface does (just write
a small spec) and whether everyone is OK with this interface. You want
to be careful it doesn't turn into a bikeshed discussion [1] though  -
lots of people are talkers and not doers, but you know this already I
guess :-)

    David

[1] : http://www.bikeshed.org/)

p.s. : I'm on PTO right now so it will take a while for me to respond to
replies