Why radeontool?

[Doug Wyatt]

 >Doug Wyatt <dwyatt at sunflower.com> writes:
 >> Yesterday, when I ran 'yum update' on F7 I got two packages
 >> installed for which I can't find a reason (see yum log
 >> excerpt below).
 >>
 >> The two new packages are vbetool and radeontool.  From
 >> what I can find, both used to be part of pm-utils.
 >>
 >> I really don't know about vbetool, maybe it's needed, but
 >> radeontool is described as:
 >>    "radeontool is a hack to save some battery on an
 >>     ATI Radeon Mobility graphics chip. Radeontool can
 >>     turn off and on the backlight and external video
 >>     output."
 >>
 >> But, my platform is a desktop, not a laptop, with a GeForce
 >> 6800 GT video card.
 >>
 >> Using yumex, I tried uninstalling radeontool to see what
 >> depended on it; there were nearly 200 of them and pretty
 >> much none of those were optional. They included most of
 >> the OpenOffice pkgs, Control-Center and system-config-*,
 >> for example.
 >>
 >> Can anyone explain, or even speculate, why radeontool?
 >>
 >
Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs at math.uh.edu> wrote:
 > It (and vbetool) were split out of pm-utils.
 >

If I assume that you saw that I noted this, myself, then
may I assume that you imply that radeontool became a
dependency simply because its parent package was one, and
not because it's actually needed?

Is this also because RPM is blind to hardware, beyond CPU
architecture?

- DAW