[Pm-utils] low power mode

[Holger Macht]

On Mo 01. Mai - 19:17:16, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> 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".

Of course powersave does this automatically when it catches an ac change.

But there are situations where you definitely need to change the policy
manually. Imagine an external power supply. I don't know what the english
term is, it's just a big battery which you can plug into the usual ac
interface. It's no battery, but some kind of limited power resource with
which you can even charge your internal batteries. The system doesn't
recognize if the power source is "limited" or not. And to change the
policy to "powersave" in this case isn't only something experienced users
might want to set.

> 
> (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?)


Regards,
	Holger