uswsusp or not?

[James Westby]

Hi all,

In https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/267141 it has been reported
that suspend is no longer offered through things using 
gnome-power-manager. My guess at the course of events was:

  * pm-utils used to use the kernel backend as uswsusp wasn't
    installed on many systems, and so the auto-detection of
    it was never triggered.

  * When recommends became installed by default the recommends
    of uswsusp by pm-utils meant that everyone got uswsusp
    installed.

  * As uswsusp was patched to stop building s2ram it wasn't
    detected as being available, and so not used.

  * pm-utils was recently patched to not check for s2ram when
    deciding which backed to use, and so uswsusp now becomes
    the "default". However, as s2ram isn't there the backend
    will say it can't do suspend, and so the user won't be
    offered suspend.

Do we want uswsusp to be installed by default? If so, and as
there is probably a good reason not to have s2ram, should we
create a dummy s2ram that uses the kernel method instead? If
we don't want uswsusp to be used by default then the recommends
should be downgraded to a suggests, which will hopefully
get it off most users machines. If we don't want uswsusp to be
used even if installed then we can change the pm-utils scripts
to not try and detect the backend, and require the user to add
a file to select the backend if they want to use e.g. tuxonice.

I think just downgrading uswsusp from Recommends to Suggests is
the way to go, but I have little experience here, so I want
to check that I am not missing something.

Thanks,

James