G-P-M on the wrong track?!

[Danny Kukawka]

On Thursday 20 October 2005 02:45, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > 11. turn off HD spinning after some idle time and change kernel VM to
> >     support this (laptopmode script).

IMO this make no sense, there are two threads in the archive about this.

> > 12. launch customer specific scripts at certain events (change of power
> >     source, lid close/open, change of power policy
> >     (powersafe/performance), etc)
>
> We just do things right and no customer specific scripts are needed. Oh,
> if you do want this HAL already supports it but I'd rather see things
> getting done right without customer specific scripts.

Would be nice if this would be possible, but in fact this is IMO not the rigth 
way. There are always people out there which want to run scipts on special 
events.  

> > 13. change most of the behaviour described above depending on power
> >     source (time to dim, time to sleep, etc.)
>
> This, except comments inline above, is pretty much what gnome-power-
> manager / gnome-hardware-manager and the KDE, XFCE equivalents should
> do. This was discussed pretty early on when Richard announced he would
> start this project.

right, but you want this as laptop user also if nobody is logged in. Because 
of this you need a daemon.

> Clearly you want this daemon in the desktop session so it can read
> settings using the desktop configuration system. 

I don't want this - no daemon on the desktop session. For me the daemon should 
have his basic default configuration in /etc which used if nobody is logged 
in to desktop. If there is a desktop user he should start a client and can 
overwrite the default settings of the daemon over a well defined DBUS 
interface.

> Because if you don't 
> read settings from there you miss out on the great features that e.g.
> gconf offers
>
>  - lockdown
>  - machine/site-specific defaults
>  - reading from LDAP
>  - and so forth
>
> Suggesting to read settings from a file in e.g. /etc is the old UNIX way
> and I think at this point many many people think that config files
> in /etc just isn't what we need in 2005. I'm curious if you agree?

Really? Why not have the basic configuration in /etc ?

> > Most of the points in the first group and point 2. of the second one
> > should only run once per machine, so I think the user session, where it
> > will be lauched once per user is not the right place. Beside this some
> > of the functions should also work if no user is logged in or even
> > depend on X.
>
> Well, 99.999% of the time people are logged in. For the very rare and
> very uninteresting case where people are not logged in my proposal is to
> run g-p-m / g-h-m from gdm as user nobody and without any UI. Oh, you
> also want to run the screensaver, this is exactly the same problem.

IMO this is not the correct way. You want to start g-p-m on GDM or 
missunderstood I something? If so, this is a massive _security desaster_. If 
there is nobody logged in, nobody should be able to set something without the 
rights. For this: a well working system daemon which work with a default 
policy defined by root.

> > > Btw, it is my view that anything else related to power management
> > > should be handled in-kernel, e.g. run time power-management
> > > (dynamically adjusting power management of certain devices, e.g.
> > > suspend a USB thumbdrive using USB PM).
> >
> > It does already a lot of that stuff, but some task are still left to be
> > done by user space programs :-)
>
> Yea, I still think most of the things we want belong in the kernel. I
> mean, ideally users should never tweak power management policy settings,
> our defaults should just rock.

Yes ideally, but this is not the reality. There are so many different user 
requirements (including to control so many different settings) and so many 
different hardware that this IMO never would happen.

Cheers,

Danny