[Pm-utils] low power mode

[Matthew Garrett]

On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 07:08:24PM +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:

> Well, to integrate with powersaved people are going to want to do:
> 
> /usr/bin/powersave -e Powersave
> and
> /usr/bin/powersave -e Performance

I'm not quite sure why you'd want this - surely powersave should just 
catch an ac event change or button press or whatever? hal (and pm-utils) 
should just be providing generic notifications, not making policy 
decisions like "switch to low power".

(I think several of the powersave "powersave" and "performance" 
distinctions are bogus - we can do better than that by figuring out 
what's actually needed rather than just having static configurations 
that mostly just serve to give the user more buttons to press, and 
"powersave" against "performance" just encourages the same sort of 
binary thinking that led us to the dire speedstep situation on Windows 
of "Oh look, my CPU goes really slowly now". Providing it doesn't cost 
us usability, we should *always* be saving power. And that requires us 
to learn from the embedded guys that have actually solved this problem 
properly - can you imagine how pissed off people would get if their PDA 
only had the same sort of functionality?)

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