Re: RFA: acpi-support -- glue layer for translating laptop buttons, plus legacy suspend support

[Giacomo Catenazzi <cate@debian.org>]

Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
>> Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
>>> Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
>>>> Michael Biebl wrote:
>>>>> Giacomo Catenazzi wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> For these two reason (power and security), I think Debian should offer
>>>>>> a debconf question, (medium priority), about disabling pooling.
>>>>> Sorry, but this is certainly not going to happen.
>>>> Why not?  Is it so bad to give user a choice?
>>> No, it's bad to misuse debconf though.
>> powertop recommend to disable hal polling.
>> (note: powertop is not a school project)
> 
> Then *maybe* it should be disabled by default, but that's not an excuse to
> misuse debconf IMHO.


Sorry, but I don't understand the misuse. I really think it is legitimate.
I don't say to have it as high priority. Why misuse? (so maybe I solve
the misunderstanding.

An other case: polling is useful only on desktop.

>>>>> The blacklist for faulty drives on the other hand, installed by
>>>>> default, might
>>>>> indeed be a good idea though.
>>>> but a blacklist is only a helper, it would not have the complete list of
>>>> broken hardware, and updates on stable are slow.
>>>> So users need to override (easily) the decision (e.g. with the debconf
>>>> question).
>>> No, users should file bugs if their HW is broken so that those can be
>>> blacklisted too.
>> Are you joking?
> 
> No
> 
>> For one year that user could not use debian stable?
> 
> a) There are point releases.
> b) The user can still disable polling even without a debconf question.

how? ;-)  It seems that hal try harder to discourage such polling.
Some low level and dangerous parameters are set in /etc/default,
we can twek easily also the kernel parameters via sysctl, but
hal doesn't use these nice feature.

ciao
	cate