Update on DeviceKit

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 07.05.08 17:39, Danny Kukawka (danny.kukawka at web.de) wrote:

> > >  org.freedesktop.PowerManagement.*
> > > 				.PowerSupply
> > > 				.CPUFreq
> > > 				.Backlight
> >
> > I think it would be best if backlight control is left to X. For some
> > graphics cards its already properly exported in XRANDR. XRANDR knows
> > about multiple screens, hotplug and stuff, is network transparent and
> > so on. It's also much easier for normal desktop apps like cheese to
> > use the backlight as a flash if its exported via XRANDR.
> 
> 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.

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.

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.

> > For those devices where backlight control cannot be done via the
> > graphics hardware the kernel interfaces should be hooked up to X. And
> > there are already many cases were brightness can be controlled via the
> > gfx hw (i.e. X) but not via the kernel interfaces.
> 
> 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. 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.

> > 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?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
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