Laptop Panel brightness control

[Sylvain Defresne]

Hello,

In 2006 a property laptop_panel.brightness_in_hardware was added to
HAL [1] to inform client of different handling of the bightness
control key by the BIOS (some BIOSes forward the event to the
userspace, some handle them directly, some both handle them and
forward them to userspace).

However, now that HAL is currently deprecated in favor of DeviceKit,
and XRandR for controlling the brightness, the difference of handling
of the brightness control key is once more causing bug in userspace
(see [2], [3] but it is not specific to gnome-power-manager, it also
affect kde user). So there is a need to one more time address this
issue by using a database to inform daemon of how the brightness event
is handled by the BIOS.

I'm willing to help with this issue as I've got one of the affected
BIOS (MSI Wind U100). However I'm not familiar with DeviceKit nor
XRandR, and don't know in which project I need to add this
caracterisation of the BIOS and exposition of the equivalent of the
laptop_panel.brightness_in_hardware property ?

Thank you for the pointers,

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2006-May/005242.html
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=601410
[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/415023

PS: I'm not subscribed to xorg-devel list, so please cc reply to me.

-- 
Sylvain Defresne