Moving PowerDevil to kdereview

[Adriaan de Groot]

On Saturday 06 September 2008 19:37:14 Kevin Ottens wrote:
> Just a quick reply before I disappear again off the intertubes... I'm not
> even supposed to have DSL right now, miracles happen sometimes. :-)

I'm even later to the party than Kevin is, but still ..

> Le Wednesday 03 September 2008, Sebastian Kügler a écrit :
> > On Friday 29 August 2008 19:45:42 Dario Freddi wrote:
> > > I am writing this mail to inform you I have moved PowerDevil from
> > > playground/utils to kdereview. PowerDevil is a Power Management system
> > > for KDE4.
> > >
> > > PowerDevil's aim is to be lightweight, feature-full, configurable,
> > > based on Solid only and fully integrated with the Desktop Environment.
> > > It is splitted into various components, a KDED module, a KCModule, a
> > > KRunner, a Plasma Engine and a Plasma Applet.

Sounds very nice. Does it really have no dependencies outside Solid? How does 
it initiate suspend when the battery is low (I'm really not sure what Solid's 
capabilities are)?

I've taken a brief look at it now, at least there's no direct use of /proc; 
there is the string "ondemand" which doesn't look quite right ("on demand" or 
"on-demand" come to mind) in the user interface, but that's headed towards 
quibbles; it compiles with non-GCC (yay!). I will need a little more time to 
massage it to build right on Solaris, simply because I'm not used to cherry-
picking bits out of kdereview for compilation so there's no handy scripts 
(yet) to help out.

> > That's actually the design we (Kevin, Jonathan, ...) had talked about at
> > Akademy 2007 in Glasgow. Thanks for implementing it. I think the overall
> > design is really sane that way. :)
>
> Now I need more time to take a look at it, it's definitely on my list to
> review when I'll be back... It'll be after the legal 2 weeks period, but
> from the discussions in this thread it probably has no major issue.
>
> Also I'm wondering "why kdeutils?", at least some bits of it could/should
> go in kdebase/runtime or kdebase/workspace IMO. I'll have to take a closer
> look at it to make up my mind there.


One thing is that stuff in base needs to make a commitment to 	supporting all 
of the platforms for KDE where it makes sense (e.g. PowerDevil doesn't need to 
support Windows or Mac, but it does need to do FreeBSD and Solaris). I realise 
this isn't something one developer can do -- I wouldn't expect anyone to run 
all of the different platforms, let alone exercise them all in useful ways -- 
but it's something to keep in mind. So I'd ask you in general terms whether 
you think you've got the abstractions and plug-in mechanisms in place to work 
with the different UNIX/POSIX platforms we're interested in. It will probably 
take a few weeks before I've had time to both build and try out PowerDevil on 
FreeBSD and Solaris (part of that is just getting the damn stuff to install on 
my ThinkPad -- it's been ages since I did a FreeBSD install). I don't think 
the review should wait on that, but I hope you'll be open even to fairly 
fundamental design questions if that's needed to support everything. I doubt 
anything fundamental will come up, just based on a quick scan of the code, but 
still...

In the medium term I'd like to work on providing build access to developers in 
a useful way so that you can try out your code on various platforms (including 
FreeBSD, Solaris and Windows Vista) as an extra check before moving it around.

[ade]