Thanks to Felix for bringing this to my attention. Obviously there was
already a safety net for feeding progressbars and graphs... and while
this makes for a good coding practice it's not a big deal. We have
widgets of type textbox for one, and a lot of string concatenation
happens. Strings are formatted, markup is applied...
If we return "N/A" like we usually do then format string "$1$2" would
look like "N/AN/A". If "/" is returned a progressbar could be
broken. Now returns are: symbol for state "unknown", 0 for battery
charge, N/A for remaining time.
It's time for a standalone battery widget that reads
/proc/acpi/battery/*/{info,state} alone. However the old battery
widget that uses 'acpitool' will not be deleted, let it serve as an
alternative widget as a convenience. Some might also prefer it over
reading multiple files in /proc
Adrian C. (anrxc)