Sunday, November 05, 2006

KPowersave on the way to 0.7.0

Only some hours until deadline for openSUSE Beta2 and a new version of KPowersave, which no longer depends on the powersave daemon and use HAL instead.

In the last days I removed the complete powersave related code and replaced it with new classes and hardware abstraction. Today I finished the basic part and we have now a powersave independend version in SVN which runs. But this does not mean the new version work as planed ... there is enough work left.

Yesterday I added an pre-annoucement for the new 0.7.x development version at kde-apps.org planed for this week. And as you can see in the comments there are people which are not so happy about switch from powersave to HAL (as you can see in this post I'm not that happy too):
... going HAL is a real downer and ( at least to me ) it turns Kpowersave into just "another" solution, stripping it from what made it different ..

powersave was EXACTLY the way to go .. and to tell you the truth, knowing why Kpowersave is going HAL is what makes everything even worse. It makes me feel like mediocrity and disdain won once again.
And there is also this question in the comments here:
What are the benefits of changing from powersaved to HAL?
So, what are the reasons for change from powersave to HAL? As first: Since the powersave developer decided to kill the powersave daemon and integrate (the most of) the functions of the daemon into HAL and pm-utils, we have no choise. We have to use the new infrastructure or KPowersave die with the daemon. This was the main reason to rewrite KPowersave.

So what are the benefits?
  • No dependency to the powersave daemon (the package is not in every distribution default).
  • We can move the most of the scheme management from the daemon to KPowersave. This make KPowersave anymore flexible than before.
  • We have now the chance to get KPowersave into the KDE SVN and maybe KPowersave could replace KLaptop as default KDE powermanagement solution.
And the disadvantages?
  • We lose the great powersave daemon, but for more read this post.