If you read through the code of gnome-applet's you'll see the only thing that uses ACPI is battstat. If you further look at the sources you'll see that ACPI support is in acpi-linux.c. You can read through the battstat_applet.c source and see that they have 2 modes "HAL Backend Mode" and "Legacy (Non-HAL) Mode". The applet will first attempt to use HAL. Then it will switch to Legacy mode. Which attempts to first read from /proc/acpi/event, if it can not do that it will talk to acpid via it's unix socket. Now HAL 0.5.9, will try to read /proc/acpi/event and if it can't it will use acpid via it's unix socket. In the HAL init script, it's set to always attempt to start after acpid so as not to cause an issue. Basically, the acpid depend needs to be removed from gnome-applets because it's just incorrect. It will use HAL and if it can't it will attempt to use the event device. There's two use cases here. The user wants to capture acpi events and process them with acpid. They know to install acpid and be happy with it. Once they install and run it.. gnome-applets will still prefer HAL over it. The other one is the user just wants stuff to work and emerge things. Then all they have to do is emerge gnome and everything works. Of course, that assumes that you guys remove the acpid depend.
Fixed in portage.
