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

[Holger Macht <hmacht suse de>]

On Mon 10. Apr - 09:53:04, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-04-09 at 14:47 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-04-09 at 21:29 +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> > > On Sun, Apr 09, 2006 at 01:47:12PM +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Since the original announcement mail about gnome-power-manager, we have
> > > > moved the mailing list to gnome.org, are now hosted on gnome.org, and am
> > > > starting to integrate with other parts of the GNOME application stack.
> > > > Lots of new functionality has been added, and lots of polish has been
> > > > applied. See the screenshots area of my website[5] for some cool
> > > > screenshots of the latest stuff in the 2-15 branch.
> > > 
> > > I would like to see g-p-m fragmented into three parts.
> > > 
> > >  * A daemon with no GTK+ dependance that would be suitable for
> > >    cross-desktop use
> > >  * A capplet (this exists today)
> > >  * A notification area icon (libnotify dependance goes here)
> > 
> > Umm, no.
> > 
> > The IPC between these components would be horrific and over-complicated
> > for no actual gain. KDE are quite happy with their own power management
> > applications, and no KDE developer has ever mentioned to me that they
> > would want such a cross-desktop daemon.
> 
> Does their power management thing use DBus, and
> if so, do we share a common interface?  I care
> much less about shared code than about shared
> interfaces.

No, KDE people are definitely not pleased with their current
implementation. They still use klaptop by default which is nearly
completely unmaintained.

Maybe Richard never heard KDE guys saiing that they want a cross desktop
daemon, but some of them do. For me personally, it's simply a some kind of
good software design to share common code and interfaces. And I repeated
myswlf already too often. Hal is an '_H_ardware _A_bstraction _L_ayer' and
_no_ power management daemon. Hal should provide device information like
battery information and nothing more.

And yes, the powersave daemon [1][2] uses a DBus interface. And our aim is
exactly what was proposed here. To have one desktop independent daemon and
several frontends for each desktop. There are already several of them:

	- KPowersave for KDE
	- wmpowersave for WindowMaker
	- gkrellm-powersave

The only real problem we have currently is that we have no gnome
frontend. So we are looking for someone who can write such a frontend.

And considering other distributions. The powersave daemon is already
widely used. KUbuntu people currently evaluate both the daemon and
kpowersave as default laptop solution. And chances are good that they will
take it. Ubuntu guys would also take it IMHO if there would be a gnome
client for it. There are packages out there for about 10 different
distributions, including Fedora Core 5, Mandriva or Debian to mention only
a few.

And power management is something real complex. It's not just popping up
some notifications. It's definitely worth to reside in an own daemon like
NetworkManager which has root privileges and can do CPU frequency scaling,
throttling, harddisk adjustments, runtime device power management, battery
management, proper suspend implementation, CPU hotplugging and a lot more.

Furthermore, we support all kind of systems, not only laptops. It's even
very useful on servers. The daemon also cares about shutting down or
suspend the system if battery runs low, even if no client is running. We
have a notification architecture that just works in every environment:

      - Client running: Daemon notifies user through client
      - No client running but KDE installed: Daemon notifies user through
        kdialog
      - No client running but GNOME installed: Daemon notifies user
        through zenityugly
      - No client running and any other desktop: Ugly xmessage
      - No X-Server: Daemon does a wall message and beeps to inform 
	the admin

And this interface is completely transparent to user. He does not have to
bother about which system he is currently using.

And we do definitely want to stick to our existing implementation or
interface. We are highly willing to adapt and change things to find one
good solution everyone likes to use and which is helpfull. So please
understand that it is needful to have a seperate daemon for power
management tasks and try to reuse an existing solution that works
great. Thus, bringing linux another step forward in regard to power
management.

Richard, please think about your current opinion and maybe try to help to
get a good solution for the GNOME desktop which usees one common backend.


Regards,
	Holger
	

[1] http://en.opensuse.org/Projects_Powersave
[2] http://powersave.sourceforge.net/
 
> 
> Any time we're providing hooks for interacting
> with the desktop, we should see if we can share
> those hooks with other free desktops.  With DBus,
> this is relatively easy, and we can still provide
> whatever additional functionality over the shared
> interface we need by providing a Gnome-specific
> interface as well.  Viva la DBus!
> 
> This stuff matters ISDs.  Many of them just won't
> bother doing things if it's difficult to manage
> the cross-desktop scenario.
> 
> --
> Shaun
> 
> 
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> gnome-power-manager-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-power-manager-list
Hi,



Hey då,
  Holger