rawhide report: 20070207 changes

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2007-02-08 at 08:49 +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> >  make hal
> > pull in libsmbios once Matt, his colleagues or others have packaged it
> > up [1] for Fedora (hint hint nudge nudge) - the latter means that Dell
> > laptops can have their backlight controlled via g-p-m etc.)
> 
> .... which is ENTIRELY the wrong way I suspect.
> The kernel provides a unified backlight API now, adding more private
> hacks rather than moving them to the unified API sounds like a step
> backwards to me ..

Yea, I agree it would be a helluva lot nicer if this could be done in
the kernel instead of doing it from user space. But as Richard says, and
from what I gather from several kernel developers, the way backlight
works on a Dell laptop is not something that people want in the kernel.
Today it's done via libsmbios and the dcdbas kernel module (which is
upstream already).

At least with HAL applications on top, like g-p-m, don't have to care;
and should someone submit a kernel module to the kernel that does this,
we'll just use that instead.

I hope that clarifies.

     David