Re: gnome-power-manager and battstat-applet

[Davyd Madeley <davyd madeley id au>]

On Fri, 2006-11-10 at 10:52 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
 
> > What magic are you missing? The graphs?
> 
> * Processor frequency scaling?
> * Laptop panel auto-dimming?
> * Setting low power mode (laptopmode) using HAL?
> * Auto-suspend when idle?
> * DPMS control?
> * Configurable buttons?
> * DBUS interface for other applications to use
> * Inhibit and UnInhibit methods

How are all of these required in a monitoring applet? These should all
be handled by the daemon. It's quite possible to run the daemon
(silently) and the applet together.

> g-p-m will not use the existing applet API. The new API by Ryan Lortie
> looks really good and when it hits HEAD I'll experiment and see how easy
> it would be to make a movable icon with text next to it in the existing
> codebase. There's already a bug open.

No, I would not recommend writing an applet for something like g-p-m on
top of this API. I'm not sure how far along Ryan is with the new API,
I'm hoping to do some experimentation and port some code over the
Australian summer.

To my mind, it makes sense to keep the display component as a standalone
process that can be started by gnome-power-manager. There is little
point in dropping all of that compatibility code, even if everyone now
has HAL.

If gnome-power-manager broke the display components of the daemon from
the management components, then it would also become possible to write
arbitrary views on top of the daemon, be it for an applet, a
notification icon, a gdesklet, some kind of Hildon widget or whatever.
This was always an abstraction I envisioned, allowing g-p-m to be
portable in the same way that NetworkManager is.

--d

-- 
Davyd Madeley

http://www.davyd.id.au/
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