Lenovo T520: Present (-STABLE) vs. Future (-CURRENT) ACPI Support

[Bigby James]

Howdy-ha, folks,

Please forgive my ignorance if my question is rather mundane and/or inane. I'm
pretty new to FreeBSD and its development cycle. Here's my situation: I've
recently  migrated my laptop (Levovo Thinkpad T520) to FreeBSD using the
10.1-STABLE snapshot, and most everything works pretty well. The only
exceptions are some of the hardware keys, including the LCD brightness control
keys, which is something I'd really like to have.

Before going ahead with that install, though, on a lark I decided to try out the
11-CURRENT snapshot to see how it worked out. As it turns out, everything
presently missing from 10-STABLE worked out of the box on -CURRENT. So I know
that full support for my machine is in the source tree now and, barring any
fundamental changes in the development branch, will be in the next -RELEASE. I
don't really have the time, know-how or guts to maintain a -CURRENT install on
this machine, so for the time being I'm sticking with 10-STABLE. So I'm
wondering just how often ACPI functionality gets moved from the -CURRENT branch
into the most recent release's -STABLE branch. In other words, what are the
chances that the features I'm waiting for will get moved into the 10-STABLE
branch in the near future? Are the ACPI devs pretty conservative with this? For
the time being I can control screen brightness using xrandr, and as fond as I am
with the convenience it is just a convenince all the same, so I can always
remain patient. But I'm wondering if there's a way to know if and when ACPI
functionality will get backported to -STABLE.  I currently follow this list and
the SVN mailing list for 10-STABLE, so I can also just keep an eye on them if
that's the answer.  Thanks in advance.

- Bigby

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