Talk:Pm-utils

From openSUSE

--

A question to the developers... As pm-utils has officially replaced powersave, will pm-utils eventually offer all of the same features as powersave did, e.g. being a single replacement for apmd, acpid, ospmd and cpufreqd? Or is the goal of this project strictly limited to a trouble-free hibernation/suspend solution?

~User:Thayerw @ Thu Aug 30 10:31:03 PDT 2007

--

Well, the goal is basically to provide a mechanism that will be used (mostly through HAL), to execute suspend and other power state transitions (e.g. "High Power" / "Low Power" mode). Generally we found out, that mixing up policy and mechanism in one place (powersaved) is not the best solution, especially for stuff where you want the users to be able to configure most of the stuff freely, so now basically the desktop applets (mainly gnome-power-manager and kpowersave) decide the policy: "What happens if the lid is closed?" while pm-utils provides the mechanism to actually do the low level stuff ("Set the system into hibernate mode NOW."). HAL acts as a middleman in between and provides the applets with information ("Sleep button was pressed!"), as well as executing the policy (applet says "suspend machine" and HAL calls "pm-suspend").

There are some use cases that were handled better in powersaved. However, the much easier implementation of user interaction (something like the "External drives could not be unmounted during suspend, so ask the user what to do"-Feature would have been a PITA to implement in powersaved. Believe me, i tried :-) and general better separation of tasks (powersaved did mix up unrelated stuff. ACPI hotkeys for example do not really have a business inside powersaved) are IMO a big plus.

If you find functionality missing then don't hesitate to file a bug in bugzilla. There will surely be some cases where i will answer "sorry, no, i won't implement this because it is too specific/complicated/obscure/whatever", but i generally will consider reasonable requests.

I hope this explains it a bit :-)

--Seife 13:59, 25 September 2007 (UTC)