xfce4 battery plugin gives wrong infomation with linux kernel 2.6.24

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:

> Yesterday, some people complained in #xfce that battery plugin wasn't
> working (using sysfs patch). He had no /sys/class/power_supply/AC but
> had a /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD. This confused the battery plugin
> (but not the 28% thingy) so I thought it could be a good idea to check
> for ACAD too, but looking on google it seems that it's not really
> frequent (at all). Can people with laptop check
> their /sys/class/power_supply and report if they have AC or ACAD (with
> the output of uname -a)?

No, this is the wrong way to do this.  The plugin should open *every* 
directory in /sys/class/power_supply, and read the properties files to 
determine which of the devices is an AC adapter -- I believe one of the 
property files will have a device-type string that can be used to 
identify whether it's an AC adapter, battery, etc.  I'm running MacOS 
atm, so I can't check what this should be, but it should be fairly easy 
to figure out for anyone with a laptop.

You can't depend on the device-name-specific directory names to stay the 
same across kernel versions or different hardware.  In this case 
'/sys/class/power_supply/' is a stable interface, and (at least some 
subset of) the files in /sys/class/power_supply/*/* are stable, but 
'/sys/class/power_supply/foo' is not.  At least, that's how I understand it.

Alternatively, the battery plugin should just use HAL, and then it can 
work on the BSDs as well without OS-specific code.

	-brian