Re: linux-next on thinkpad x60: full battery is indicated as battery error in mate

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 12:04 AM, Pavel Machek <pavel@xxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> > >> Fully charged
>> > >> battery shows as empty battery with red "x" in Mate desktop. After
>> > >> reboot to recent mainline problem goes away. Tooltip says "battery
>> > >> waiting to charge".
>> > >>
>>
>> For the MATE bug see:
>> https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-power-manager/pull/251
>>
>> The problem is in the new composite battery system in UPower, it
>> "merges" two external batteries into a single one for reporting. That
>> battery does not understand "Not Charging" inside the MATE Power
>> Manager. The above patch fixes that in MATE.
>
> Ok, so problem is 91eea70e5e5ce12eb1c7cd922e561fab43e201bd.
>
> And now, I see that MATE should be improved.
>
> But what I also see is that kernel is changing its interface in a way
> that (while making sense) breaks existing application. And we don't
> break existing applications.
>
> [Now... maybe if the fix for the application is available for long
> long time and noone is really looking and everyone already has new
> application version, maybe ... But pull request for MATE is 9 days
> old, and not even merged. So there is no way this is suitable for
> 4.17.]

Right.

This basically means that we will have to defer the battery changes
until user space is ready and not just upstream, but also in distro
packages.