[Pm-utils] Re: Better integration with power management scripts

[Matthew Garrett]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 01:37:30PM +0200, Holger Macht wrote:
> I definitely agree with you that the best/correct solution would be to
> provide an application the possibility to delay the suspend for this
> purpose, but not all applications will be suspend aware, or even better,
> aware of any power management, this will simply never happen.

We're designing *now*. We shouldn't be hamstrung by the mistakes of the 
past. The fact that we have the source code to all the applications we 
care about means that we /can/ fix the applications that matter - this 
is what separates us from the Windows world.

> And if pm-utils should only provide mechanism, then it has to be seperated
> into many different pieces. If you only trigger suspend via hal and it
> runs continuously until its finished, policy making applications don't
> have the possibility to make policy decisions. Well, the base that would
> be in hal maybe wouldn't need it, but the things vendors/distributions add
> might need it. So there must a chance for applications to know at which
> stage the suspend cycle is, for example when a vendor script is executed
> and when finished.

Do you have any use cases where policy decisions need to be made during 
the suspend process? I honestly can't think of any - all the information 
is available beforehand.

> Agreed, but you have to give policy applications a possibility to know
> what's going on to be able to make policy decisions, see above.

Right, but "What's going on during suspend" is (barring bugs) 
deterministic. You don't need feedback during that process - from a 
desktop point of view, it should be considered as atomic.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org