[patch] Move negative checks to util.c, from acpi.c (resend)

[Richard Hughes]

On Thu, 2005-08-18 at 05:35 +0200, Danny Kukawka wrote:
> On Thursday 18 August 2005 03:36, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > the main point is 
> > that the bug with ACPI is something that should be fixed.. In other
> > words, I don't think we should design for broken hardware... I'm not
> > super religious about this - what does other people think?
> 
> I understood your intention. Yes it would be really cool to have only hardware 
> without broken ACPI Implementation. But this is not the reality. There are so 
> many broken systems (maybe more broken than correct ;-)) We can't fix the 
> hardware. I think we should also (if it's easy) workaround broken ACPI 
> hardware. 

Okay, from a user program PoV, maybe the error conditions should be
reported as 100% (else like David says, programs might mis-interpret
this as a low power condition) - or what about using 101%? that's enough
for a user to notice, and bugzilla, but wouldn't trigger a low power
shutdown.

If we include such a -1 error value then each program has to handle the
fallback, when it should be relying on hal for the properly sanitised
data.

Maybe we should use a key such as linux.acpi.problems where we could put
"no charge_level" as a indicator that something was wrong. Maybe a crazy
idea.

Richard.