On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 8:45 AM, Peter Hüwe <[email protected]> wrote: > Am Dienstag 07 Juni 2011, 15:48:11 schrieb Arjan van de Ven: >> > I'm open to suggestions. >> >> Hi, >> >> I would like some more opinions on this from people on the list. >> So initially my plan was to, instead of powertop show the shell >> tunables, document these in a website/document instead. >> That way there could be a better explanation of gotcha's, kernel >> versions etc etc.... think of it like a wiki. >> >> but people keep kinda wanting these things from the powertop program >> directly..... >> am I very wrong with the documentation idea? if so... yes we need >> something like your patch. >> > I like both approaches, but the documentation approach lacks one big thing - > the documentation ;) > > I mean it's been 6 months since the second alpha of powertop 2.0 : > > Peter > Maybe a "help" option for each tunable would be great (e.g. press h to > display a short help text which describes the tunable, with its possible > consequences and savings), and a description how to change the setting > manually. > > Arjan> I was thinking of documenting this on a webpage instead, because there >> I have much more space to explain things... >> (and not the 3 lines I have in current powertop 1.13) > > But maybe a combination of both would be good - short version in powertop, > long version on the wiki.
This topic always pops up, because people will want max power savings on every distro... The biggest reason to say "no" is because it discourages distributions from fixing things :) Proper documentation (plus, say, writing for each one when the default setting was enacted upstream and/or the major distro's) sounds like a way better starting point. From there on, we can potentially document things like "this setting may remove your keyboard functionality" and tag other potentially dangerous options. The documentation will also help upstream distro's to make the right choices and so it's a win-win situation. Packagers often do not have the time to read the powertop code base anyway, and figure out how each setting works. I would much rather have a separate tool to tune things BTW - let powertop be the diagnostics tool, and design a separate application that does the tuning really well - possibly running from an upstream database that can be upgraded/downloaded quickly. Auke _______________________________________________ Power mailing list [email protected] https://bughost.org/mailman/listinfo/power
