Greetings -devel, It is my pleasure to announce the creation of a project to create a common power-management framework[1] for Debian (and eventually, the world). This idea, in various forms, has been discussed several times in the past[2][3] with a generally positive response. These ideas have even been implemented, to some extent, in the laptop-mode-tools and pbbuttonsd packages. Now we finally have enough interest and coordination to make some real progress in putting together a coherent solution that can provide a valuable service to Debian.
Fundamentally, our goal is to create an architecture-independent, power-system-independent, and power-daemon-independent system to handle power-related events (e.g. lid close, battery events). This will likely happen by hooks from the power daemons (scripts in their event handlers) that will invoke a common event handler. This common handler will run its system-independent scripts (possibly in the style of a runlevel) based on its configuration, then return control to the daemon to complete its handling. Now to the big question... Why? At first glance, this may seem like just another level of cruft to unnecessarily complicate a system that currently works just fine. Quite to the contrary, the design goals of the common power-management framework is to simplify the system and provide many useful features to developers, administrators, and users. There should be no need to modify anything in the daemon's event handler for all but the most daemon-specific contexts. In fact, it has been suggested (although it is probably a pipe dream at this point) that the common event handler could completely replace the script interface of the existing power daemons. Some of the benefits of this system: Developers will be able to respond to power-related events, regardless of architecture, daemon, and OS by installing a single script for the common event handler.[5] This script will be properly handled even as new power-systems and daemons are created with no necessary changes from the developer. Administrators will be able to easily share configurations between computers with different power systems and operating systems, and easily upgrade from one power system to another. Users will be able to choose from several standard actions for power events during install and to easily change/customize these actions.[6] We have not yet finalized any of the design decisions, and invite anyone interested in the specifics to join the conversation on the powermgmt-devel mailing list.[4] On behalf of the Common Power-Management Framework team, Kevin 1. http://powermgmt.alioth.debian.org/ 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/08/msg01307.html 3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2004/04/msg00455.html 4. http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/powermgmt-devel 5. It has also been suggested to provide DBUS messages on power-related events and status that programs could respond to/query. Also, inclusion/creation of command line tools for querying power status is being considered. 6. This will probably be implemented using a -scripts package that will install scripts to run based on debconf questions during installation. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
