Comment 13 for bug 501500

As far as the sanity checks go, here is my rationale: Batteries deteriorate with time and use, especially when there is no battery management by way of the BIOS (unfortunately the kernel tp_smapi module is the only one I'm aware of under Linux, which gives me the option to do something about it). So even if the battery is not charging, it is more useful to the laptop owner to know how full (in percent or absolute capacity) the battery is, instead of just saying "fully charged", when values in the labels "energy:", "energy-full:", and "percentage:" clearly contradict this statement.

So I would suggest that gnome-power-manager only shows a full icon when the values in energy, energy-full and percentage are the same. Other than that the tooltip should supply the current state in the form of "Not charging/Charging/Discharging, at XX% at the moment". A second line in the tooltip text could say something like "Estimated xx hours yy minutes until charged" (if charging) or "Estimated xx hours and yy minutes battery life" (in case the user is not plugged into the AC").