[Sugar-devel] automatic backlight control

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 21.11.2011, at 15:22, Paul Fox wrote:

> it quickly became clear (to me, at least) that it would be confusing
> if user-dimming behaved differently than auto-backlight-control, with
> respect to monochrome mode.  whether or not it's confusing to the
> user, it's definitely confusing to the code, since it's difficult to
> always do the right thing if the user and the sensor are both changing
> the brightness at the same time.  so i disabled the switch to
> monochrome entirely -- using the brightness keys doesn't change the
> color/mono setting.

IMHO (and not having tried it yet) the current behavior (switching to mono when manually reducing brightness) is fine, and the best compromise we found so far.

When you add the auto-turnoff, it should only toggle the backlight, not the mono-color setting. I don't think that would be too confusing, from a user's POV it just means when it's bright outside, the backlight's power gets cut.

I can see how it would lead to confusion if you map this desired behavior onto the existing olpc-brightness command. What's needed I think is an additional "override" independent of the brightness setting that just turns the backlight off. Everything else would stay the same.

- Bert -