disappointment over default acpid config

[Callum Lerwick]

There's something seriously wrong with the current design of g-p-m, yes.
I have it set to suspend-to-disk my laptop when I hit the power button.
I noticed when I'm not logged in, at the GDM login screen, it doesn't
work. This is silly. Also, me and my wife share the laptop using GDM's
flexible servers. What happens when two people are logged in? Three?
Who's policy should be followed? Who gets to enforce policy?

What needs to happen is a setup much like NetworkManager, there needs to
be a PowerManager daemon that talks to HAL and carries out policy, and
has nothing to do with X or Gnome.

gnome-power-manager seems to be muddling three things: 

1) configuring policy
2) carrying out policy
3) providing misc UI

Number 1 should be handled by a system-config-power applet. Power
management is screaming system-wide to me. Per-user seems ugly and
wrong. I see little reason to have per-user configuration. (I guess this
is mostly what gnome-power-preferences is currently doing?)

Number 2 should be handled by a PowerManager daemon. Or hell, maybe just
merge it all into the next generation init. (I already bitched about
this earlier, and pm-scripts seems to be turning into yet another
re-invention of what init/initscripts should be doing)

Number 3 needs to just get blended into gnome. GUI options to suspend
and hibernate should just be put right next to where you see "shut down"
and "restart". And there's already a bazillion and one battery status
applets. (Though I suppose g-p-m talks to HAL exclusively? Its also
fairly pretty. Does it need to be a notification area applet? Once the
policy enaction is torn out, can't it be made a native gnome applet? Let
the KDE guys write their own HAL based battery applet.)