[PATCH] xfce4-power-manager: Support for keyboard backlight control

[Yves-Alexis Perez]

On Wed, 2013-11-06 at 19:52 +0100, Nick Schermer wrote:
> Imho xfpm can be much simpler. What you really want is a small frontend to
> control what happens when an event is triggered (power buttons, lid) and
> some control over things like screen standby time. Not much people need
> more than that.
> From a technical point of view this belongs in xfsettingd.
> 
> Battery status is really something that should be added to
> Xfce4-battery-plugin (a backend for upower).

Well, the debate x-b-p/xfpm is there since ages, I think there are
branches in both project to more or less bridge the gap between them (a
battery plugin for xfpm, and a hal/upower/whatever branch in x-b-p).
Unfortunately, none of them is actually really maintained nowadays, so
I'm not sure what's the real way forward…
> 
> Screen brightness is like volume control. Some people love it, some hate
> it. Not a perfect place for it.

I have to admit I find xfce4-volumed pretty useful, since it's more or
less invisible all the time. Maybe this could be done inside a larger
daemon like xfce4-session or xfsettingsd (or gnome-settings-daemon), but
having a tiny daemon means more modularity, which is something I really
like in Xfce.
> 
> What remains in the code is a lot of dbus crap that nobody will ever adopt
> and things the kernel is way better in by default.

To be honest, having a simple frontend to upower was something I would
have really liked few months ago. Now it's already too late, upower
won't be enough and it'll need to speak to logind apparently. Or call
pm-utils directly (or just echo mem > /sys/power/state on linux, with
correct permissions obviously).

So, in any case, I really think we need a maintainer for xfpm, with a
plan for making everything “just work”. Maybe the plan won't fit
everyone (including me) but at one point, it'll really be needed or else
we'll just lose a very useful feature. And yes, unfortunately I'm not
volunteering for this.

Regards,
-- 
Yves-Alexis
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