RFA: acpi-support -- glue layer for translating laptop buttons, plus legacy suspend support
Dear all,
I'm putting the acpi-support package up for adoption. The RFA bug is here:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522683
I have copied the text of the bug report below (since my mail client did
not allow me to set X-Debbugs-CC). If anyone is interested to adopt this
package, please get in touch!
Cheers,
Bart
---------------------------------SNIP-----------------------------
I want to stop maintaining the acpi-support package and am looking for
an adopter. This package is relatively high-profile, since it is
installed by default on all laptops, and part of it is installed on all
ACPI machines. There are some specific challenges with the package that
make it "interesting" to maintain, for some value of interesting. The
package provides the following:
1. Power button support for all systems, in the form of package
acpi-support-base.
2. Button support for laptops. Special laptop button translations are
included for various laptop brands and types. This also includes default
scripts for button functionality for some laptops, including wireless
buttons etc.
3. Suspend/resume support. Acpi-support used to be one of the primary
suspend packages, before pm-utils came along. Right now, it still
contains the suspend logic, but in the default configuration it
delegates any suspend requests to pm-utils. Still, the legacy suspend
support should keep working for now.
This package receives a pretty steady stream of bug reports due to new
hardware with new button quirks, and it requires active maintenance.
There are several challenges involved in maintaining this package:
1. The upstream for this package is Ubuntu. Ubuntu has never been very
cooperative at accepting changes, until recently: our contact Steve
Langasek has indicated that he is interested in merging most or all of
our changes, provided that we send them in in chunks, with proper
rationales.
2. Even though we have an upstream, we build the package as a
Debian-native package, since we have extensively changed the package. We
moved files around etc., and specifying an upstream source tarball
results in an incorrect package being built. :-/
3. Changes from the upstream are extensive:
- We build two packages: acpi-support-base and acpi-support. The
upstream builds only one, for laptops only.
- We have support for "suspend methods", i.e., we can delegate suspend
to pm-utils but we can also handle it ourselves, depending on configuration.
- A very large variety of small changes have been made as well, in
response to bug reports. None of these changes have been sent upstream. :-/
4. Ubuntu is PHASING OUT this package. They have already moved suspend
to pm-utils (but have failed to remove suspend support from
acpi-support). They're currently moving hotkey translation to hal. This
means that soon we will have no upstream that we can follow! Or we
should ensure that Ubuntu's hal changes are included in our version of
hal as well -- no clue how those packages are related, or whether
Ubuntu's changes are going into upstream hal.
5. The kernel is adding more and more native support for these buttons,
so that acpi-support does not need to translate them anymore.
In the end, the package may need phasing out in Debian as well, or it
may need to become the upstream instead of Ubuntu, in which case it
requires extra maintenance. Whatever happens, it will be a challenge to
keep all hardware working properly. Whoever adopts this package will
help to keep extremely large numbers of laptop users happy!
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