Joachim Breitner's Homepage

Chris Lamb has announced his gaim plugin "gaim-lightthink" both on his blog and on the thinkpad-linux mailing list. His plugin does basically the same thing as my gaim-thinklight plugin. I was a bit surprised to read that his plugin is supossed to be a lightweight replacement for mine, as he says on the code page.

As he has not yet replied to my mail, I can only guess what he means - it's probably not lines of code, I count 111 in mine and 128 in his. So I hoped he had found a better solution for letting the user write the /proc/acpi/ibm/light file, but he just requires the user to change permissions himself (on every boot, that is), while I install a suid program that does nothing but lets anyone write one of two strings to that file. Also, I think constructing a long line like "echo on > /proc/acpi/ibm/light; sleep .400; echo off > /proc/acpi/ibm/light; sleep .400;...; &" is not very lightweight compared to call the light controlling program directly from gaim, using gtk's event loop for the delays. But maybe I'm missing something...

BTW, I'm still looking for a sane way to let my plugin write to that /proc file. There should be a system wide list of files and permissions for virtual files (/proc, /sys), where packages like gaim-thinklight can register their needs. This file should then be worked off upon boot (or better, upon mounting of the respective file system).