Re: G-S-D support wireless/touchpad switch

[Jens Granseuer <jensgr gmx net>]

Hi Lin.

On 25.11.2008 08:04, Lin Ma wrote:
> Hello Jens,
>
> I seems to ask the wrong people. I just forgot to ask the
> maintainers, sorry. Since you are very active according to
> the Changelog. Could you give me some suggestions on this
> feature?

The easiest way to get to the "correct" people usually is
to file a bug in bugzilla.

Or to write to the mailing list. g-s-d mostly co-uses the
gnome-control-center list which I have CC'ed as well.

> > Hello GSD gurus,
> >
> > I'm an desktop engineer of Sun from China. I'm looking for a
> > RFE for GSD, but I don't know where the best place is to ask
> > the question, so I directly send the mail to you. :-)
> >
> > I see GSD has supported many media keys and XF86Display,
> > which means GSD has better supporting for laptops. While it
> > doesn't seem to support switch on/off wireless, touchpad
> > and bluetooth which are popular on laptops now.
> >
> > The questions are:
> > Is GSD the best place to support to switch those devices on/off?

Depends. Please take into account that I'm not particularly
knowledgable concerning hardware integration issues, so
take what I'm going to say with a grain of salt. My feeling
is that most of the hardware support itself should go to
a separate program (though which one I am not sure of; g-p-m?
hald? DeviceKit? something else entirely?). Adding hotkey
support to g-s-d using interfaces exposed by those programs
then would be fine.
(Then there's the question how useful killing bluetooth via
hotkeys is, but since I don't have bluetooth I wouldn't know
anyway.)

> > If yes, does anyone have the plan to implement those functions?

Not that I'm aware of. For better touchpad support there is
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154029, though
(tangentially related).

> > If you think the RFE makes sense. I would be glad to
> > work for that. My basic idea is to copy the existed OSD
> > window of sound of GSD, grab the related keys [1] and
> > invoke corresponding methods to switch those devices.
> >
> > These OSDs should look like:
...
> > When users first press the key, then focus on Cancel
> > button, double press will change the focus and then
> > switch the devices.

My spontaneous response is we shouldn't add controls to
the OSD window. That's somewhat akin to the annoying
"do you really want to do that" dialogs. However, I'm
certainly no usability expert. If there is evidence to
the contrary I can be swayed. Initial reaction, though,
is "bad". (I can see the point that killing wireless
accidently might not be such a great thing, I just
don't much like the solution.)

> > I think I should consider the following things:
> > 1) the device existence,
> > 2) the state of the device,
> > 3) the user's privilege.

How would the user's privileges figure into the OSD?

> > I probably will introduce a dependency of HAL into
> > GSD, I'm not sure if it is acceptable.

Only as an optional dependency. Now that DeviceKit
has been proposed as a HAL replacement I'm not sure
how wise this would be, though.

> > What do you think? Welcome any suggestion, comments
> > or point me a correct way and a correct module to
> > implement those things for better supporting
> > laptops.  ;-)

As I said, I'm no expert, so I'd welcome additional
opinions.

Jens