disappointment over default acpid config

[David Woodhouse]

On Sun, 2005-11-06 at 23:13 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> The policy is stored in g-p-m (gconf, per user) and HAL just does the
> information processing (battery.time_remaining) and method heavy lifting
> (Suspend, Hibernate, SetLCDBrightness, etc.).
> 
> HAL doesn't enforce any policy at all. Without g-p-m running you won't
> be able to "suspend after 15 minutes of inactivity" or any cleverness
> like that.
> 
> I'm not sure the "without X" argument is that important (flame retardant
> suit ON..) as the typical laptop isn't booting for very long. If we load
> a headless g-p-m when gdm loads, then we have 99.999% of the time
> covered.

I'm slightly less concerned by the 'without X' case than I am by the
'without user' case.

I was bitten the other day by a NetworkManager regression in this
respect. I'm used to just turning my laptop on and walking (or driving)
away from it. Within a minute or two NetworkManager will make sure it's
on the network.

A few days ago I did this after upgrading NetworkManager, and the laptop
remained inaccessible from the network. When I returned to it, I found
that the GNOME keyring manager now insisted on asking me for a password
before it would access the WEP key which is already stored in the
_standard_ system-wide configuration in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts.

You need to have a way to set system-wide policies, even if they're only
a default and can be overridden by users in certain cases.

-- 
dwmw2