[Pm-utils] offtopic: sleep nomenclature

[Richard Hughes]

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 09:24 +0200, Stefan Seyfried wrote:
> On Fri, May 05, 2006 at 08:12:05AM +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> 
> > If you know of a project that's using the wrong name, or a distro, then
> 
> Well, i don't think here is a "right" or "wrong". It depends on the users
> you target. And even non-technical users are not as stupid as one might
> think.
> My children (7 and 8 years) immediately knew what "suspend to RAM" and
> "suspend to disk" meant. Of course they als know what "RAM" is.

Well my parents still gets confused about saving a file to "memory" and
so for them suspend-to-ram means as little as suspend-to-disk and they
are not stupid people.

> But then, IMO computers _are_ things that you should have some minimal
> knowledge about, otherwise you will screw up big time anyway.

But we shouldn't have users googling before they can just suspend the
computer, right?

> > please open bugs to that component and make them aware they should be
> > using suspend and hibernate (point them to the wiki page).
> 
> Assuming that these projects would agree with you :-)

Pahh, give it time, and enough bugzilla's :-)

> And from a technical point of view, it does not really matter how the
> HAL methods are named. They could be named "foo1" and "foo2" as long
> as it is well documented that "foo1" does "suspend" and "foo2" does
> "hibernate".

Oh, from a technical point of view I agree, but if we have a couple of
well defined names then we should strive to use them so it's all
consistent and not a horrible mess:

>From Paul Sladen, in a Ubuntu bugzilla entry;
>here's from NOTES from 'hotkey-setup'
>  When the machine should be put to sleep in some fashion:
>  KEY_SLEEP signals Suspend to RAM (Suspend, technically called
"standby")
>   KEY_SUSPEND signals Suspend to Disk (Hibernate, technically called
"suspend"...)

So by adopting common names, and actively *changing* other projects we
can help to cut out this crazy confusion we have now. (IMO)

Richard.