[Pm-utils] Why do we still ship hal-system-power-pmu / PMU support suboptimal in pm-utils

[Sjoerd Simons]

On Mon, Dec 03, 2007 at 07:01:22PM -0500, Doug Klima wrote:
> Richard Hughes wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 10:51 +0100, Stefan Seyfried wrote:
> >> On Sun, Dec 02, 2007 at 06:45:03PM +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> >>> On Sun, 2007-12-02 at 10:00 +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> >>>> I have to add, that pm-utils in Debian does not ship pm-pmu (it was
> >>>> removed by the Debian maintainer deliberately), as we tried to make
> >>>> pm-utils an arch:all package (only shell scripts)
> >>> Please don't do this.
> >> care to give a reason? I think this is very reasonable.
> > 
> > What benefit does it bring?
> 
> It brings the benefit of not having a totally broken package. pm-utils 
> is all but dead upstream. I made several requests and they went 
> virtually unanswered. I even had to do all the leg work of getting 
> pm-utils.freedesktop.org registered as a web host when I requested some 
> sort of data. This is the only e-mail to the ML in 3 months. It's 
> YARHTTGABFBOP. Yet Another RedHat Technology That Gets Abandoned But 
> Forced By Other Packages.
> 
> > 
> >>>>  and provide the pmu
> >>>> functionality (together with support for all the other quirks) in one
> >>>> single binary
> >>> No, that's no how it is supposed to be put together.
> >> Why?
> > 
> > Because that's how it's put together on most of the big distros - and
> > more often that not it works, and most importantly people understand how
> > it works.
> 
> Big distros defined as Red Hat / Fedora only?

It's really a shame seeing pm-utils going this way. As it is a really nice
initiative in theory, with which everyone probably agrees.. Having one (or
more!) power-management solution per distribution is just a pain to support.

But looking at the current reality. Debian and Suse's pm-utils are heavily
patched to support uswsusp. Afaik the Ubuntu development branch currently uses 
Debians version. Looking at Doug's comment, gentoo also doesn't use a vanilla
pm-utils (or maybe not at all, dunno). So yeah, of the major distros only
fedora/RH use a vanilla pm-utils..

I was talking to debian's pm-utils maintainer the other day and he seemed very
frustrated about the unresponsiveness of the pm-utils upstream and from what i
read on the list he's not the only one.


But it doesn't help to make this thread into a big rant about this :)

 From what i've heard from our (debians) pm-utils maintainer, he went the
uswsusp way because it has various nice features. Like supporting suspend to
both disk and ram (So you can still recover when your battery runs out while in
suspend to ram), the possibility to encrypt the disk image etc.

It would good to see some rationale from people more knowledgable in the
suspend area then myself, why they choose to go a specific way. And see if we
can get some fresh air into pm-utils :)

  Sjoerd
(On a related note, can it please switch from CVS to something people in this
  century actually like to use :))
-- 
Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral.
		-- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"