Bug 848915

Summary: profoundly bad argument parsing in intel_backlight
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 13.1 Reporter: Jon Nelson <jnelson-suse>
Component: X.OrgAssignee: E-mail List <xorg-maintainer-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED UPSTREAM QA Contact: E-mail List <xorg-maintainer-bugs>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P3 - Medium CC: eich
Version: RC 1   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: Other   
OS: Other   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
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Description Jon Nelson 2013-11-04 22:16:52 UTC
User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0

linux-k1fq:~ # intel_backlight 
current backlight value: 100%
linux-k1fq:~ # intel_backlight  -h
current backlight value: 100%
set backlight to 0%
linux-k1fq:~ # 



Imagine how much fun it was to have my display suddenly go to 100% black while trying to get the usage/help for a program.  Fortunately, I managed to hit up-arrow and backspace a few times, type '100', and hit enter once based entirely on a *guess* as to how this software works.

It's a bit insane that the *default* approach to failure-to-parse-an-argument is to *assume* that the user wants the backlight set to *zero* percent.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1 Egbert Eich 2015-11-17 09:28:51 UTC
intel_backlight is part of the intel-gpu-tools. Looking at the README in this package, it says: 
"This is a collection of tools for development and testing of the Intel DRM
driver."
Thus they are meant for developers to do their work but for end user consumption.
We could decide to not ship them - would this be better? 
They are also useful for debugging: so that a user is able to test something or dump some data for analysis - with precise instructions what to do.

If you think the tools should be fixed, please report this to Intel thru bugs.freedesktop.org.