[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Auto-connect feature

[From: Simon Pickering]

> >> The idea is that N800 is connected all the time to known WLAN access 
> >> points so that your VoIP calls actually do come in. If we go with any 
> >> of your proposals this will not work, right?
> > 
> > Unfortunately, with default setup, you get an empty battery N800 if 
> > you stay at home :
> > 
> > I've been hit by this bug saturday night : I put my brand new N800 on 
> > locked mode, before going to sleeping and it connected to my AP in the 
> > night (because of the auto-connect feature + jabber/google talk) and 
> > when I woke up on sunday morning, there was no energy anymore in it :(
> > 
> > I tried to set "auto disconnect after 5 or 10 minutes of inactivity" 
> > to try to workaround it but the presence applet prevent inactivity 
> > detection.
> > 
> > So, if you want to go to sleep, don't forget to put your N800 in 
> > offline mode before locking it (or disable auto-connect).
> 
> That would jave been nice to have aut-connect disabled if 
> manually disconnected fro wi-fi. Or at least a quick way to 
> turn off autoconnect without having to dig to control 
> panel/connection settings.

I was wrong in what I said previously, with auto-connect disabled, the quite
nice feature of the browser connecting without opening the connection dialog
doesn't work (which is a shame). 

The 'problem' with google talk may be supposed to be a feature! Having a
list of apps that are allowed to auto-connect and/or a hard timeout on the
auto-connection would avoid this problem for those who don't want a flat
battery in the morning.

Even better (and to still allow for VoIP should you want to use it), would
be to allow the user to manually configure the timeouts for different apps
(e.g. weather/rss could have 30s every 20min then disconnect, VoIP could be
always on, email could have 1min every 5min, etc.). If using an allow-list,
the timeouts would have to be hard (e.g. something not on the list may be
using the connection, so you shouldn't stay connected just because of that),
and you'd need semaphores/some other synchronisation mechanism to stop
allowed apps from being cut off in the middle of their slot. It would also
require some thought about whether to reset the wait interval for the less
frequent slots if they can use the connection instigated by apps that need
to be online more frequently.

Hope that makes some sense!

This is obviously extra infrastructure work, depends whether anyone thinks
it might be (more) useful I suppose.

Cheers,


Si