Update on DeviceKit

[Danny Kukawka]

On Mittwoch, 7. Mai 2008, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Wed, 07.05.08 17:39, Danny Kukawka (danny.kukawka at web.de) wrote:
[...]
> > And what if there is no X running (e.g. machine runs on tty*) and someone
> > wants to control the brightness? There should be a way to use the
> > available kernel interfaces without X if possible. I would prefer to have
> > brightness handling still in HAL/DeviceKit.
>
> X haters are probably D-Bus haters, too.

..probably .. that is not an argument. 

> It is a totally artificial scenario that someone who refuses to use X
> would like to control his screen brightness with a D-Bus
> service. Ignore those crazy people.

Don't provide a system service only under the assumtion that everything is 
X-centric. They are not crazy people.

> Console logins should be kept around for administration purposes and maybe
> for some servers. But in those cases you don't care about backlight
> control anyway.
>
[...]
> > And IIRC I have seen several cases where it didn't work via XBACKLIGHT,
> > but via HAL (e.g. Dell machines).
>
> Yepp, but as soon as HAL is dead it won't work via either. 

What kind of argument is this? Loosing features and hardware support is 
acceptable? No, it is not!

> So instead of 
> hooking up everything to a new fancy backlight control daemon you could
> just hook it up to X where a lot of work has already been done in this
> area, where an API is established and where some other people do the
> maintaining for you.

Nobody speak about a "new fancy backlight control daemon". It should simply go 
into a DeviceKit-powermanagement (or how ever you would like to call it) and 
should provice at least the same functionality as currently HAL. And because 
of this KDE or GNOME (or whatever) applications could use simply the new DBus 
interface instead of HAL. Thats much easier than do everything through X.

> > > Backlight control via HAL should be phased out, together with HAL
> > > itself.
> >
> > Would like to see backlight control in DeviceKit.
>
> As I understood David this is not going to happen. The question is
> whether backlight control should be done in X or in some D-Bus
> server. Sticking it directly into DeviceKit is not the idea. Am I
> right, David?

I didn't say DeviceKit itself. As I already wrote: it should be also provided 
by a powermanagement DeviceKit daemon.

Danny