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

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <pochu@ubuntu.com>]

Giacomo Catenazzi wrote:
> 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.

I don't think Debconf is here to workaround bugs. This is like if we start
asking questions in every package asking questions because something *could* go
wrong.

Either polling works fine for almost everybody, and for those who don't we
blacklist the hardware, or if it doesn't work for too many people, we can
whitelist those who work, or we disable polling completely if it were so broken.

But let's not ask questions to disable a feature that most people won't need,
specially when we can solve it by other means.

> An other case: polling is useful only on desktop.

Why?

>>>>>> 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? ;-)

I dunno, but surely if you can do it through Debconf, you can do it manually. If
it's not trivial, there's a manpage that could be expanded.

Cheers,
Emilio

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