Remember Sleep-Timer on boot

[DanRock]

I've been using RockBox for about 8 months on a Sansa.

The functionality of the Sleep-Timer currently resets upon booting, or to that effect.  90% of the time I need the Sleep-Timer to be set.  I'd like to have the option of setting a default Sleep-Timer value upon boot.

If this feature is not widely desired to be incorporated, would a patch be difficult for an experienced RockBox coder?

Thanks,
Dan

[AlexP]

Feature requests belong on flyspray.

[DanRock]

Thanks for he reply and direction.  I found a similar but old request  FS#1831 from Dec 2003.   Can users request vote on requests to show one's support for a request?  

[AlexP]

Not sure, but it is pointless anyway.  All the developers are volunteers that do what they want in their spare time.  Feature requests are good for ideas for them, or reminders etc.

[DanRock]

Ok thanks.  If I were a developer I want to know how all users rank feature requests and bugs.  It's a great incentive to work on items that have the most impact.  

I now have some incentive to learn the development procedures for RockBox though.  A bit of a learning curve for me coming from the C# windows side.  I'd like to contribute if I can come up to speed on it though.

[AlexP]

Cool, please do.  I'm sure you've spotted it, but rockbox is written in C with bits of ASM here and there.

[dana7]

DanRock,

I wish you well, because I would love to see that feature too.  

Most useful.

Please hurry!

[DanRock]

Progress.  I have managed to build the baseline system ok.  I also have a working test build which defaults the sleep_timer to some positive value.  

That was the easy part.  Now I need to figure out reading/writing the config file and adding a new menu option.

[Llorean]

One easy solution: Set the config loading to *load* a sleep timer value, but prevent the "manage config" from saving a sleep timer value. That way the current behaviour of "don't save sleep timer settings on manual poweroff" is kept, but you can add a sleep timer line to your fixed.cfg if you want it to load at boot every time.

[DanRock]

I think that's exactly the behaviour we're all looking to have.  Thank you for the guidance.  I'll do as you suggest.  

[DanRock]

Would what you suggest require a user to manually create the fixed.cfg and not have a menu option?

[Llorean]

Yes. This is the current case with fixed.cfg, anyway.

[LinusN]

I think Rockbox should always remember the last Sleep Timer value instead of having to edit fixed.cfg.

[Llorean]

I don't know. If you set the sleep timer for 15 minutes, and it goes to sleep, next time on do you want to have to remember to unset it before you can play normally? It seems, at the very least, there should need to be one extra step to make it "permanent". This could be saving a fixed.cfg file, or it could simply be an option in the menu "Persistent Sleep".

My suggestion, though, was for the solution I thought might be easiest to code as a once-off for someone to use for themselves. If included, I think the option is more useful.

[fml2]

It seems, at the very least, there should need to be one extra step to make it "permanent".

This is an issue that, in general, applies to each and every setting. I.e. should the changes to a setting made manually after boot be persisted on shut down? I.e. each setting could have a 'shadow' flag that would tell if the changes should be persisted.

This is of course an overkill. The general approach now is that almost all changes are persisted. But there are also exceptions. E.g. pitch. I've created a patch (FS#8521) to make it '50%' persistent (read the description in the FS to see what I mean by '50%').

So the question is: what setting category (persisted/non persisted) should the sleep timer belong to?