CK: more paranoia, idle status, and creation-time

[William Jon McCann]

On 2/19/07, David Zeuthen <david at fubar.dk> wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-02-19 at 18:34 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-02-19 at 10:40 -0500, William Jon McCann wrote:
> > > The property change notification is emitted from the CK session
> > > object.  In the case where the session is GNOME related this property
> > > is set by gnome-screensaver.  So, I don't think there is much
> > > advantage to gnome-power-manager not listening to gnome-screensaver
> > > directly.  There are some disadvantages like adding more points of
> > > failure, the fact that this property is not necessarily authoritative
> > > (at the moment anything can use the SetIdle method - not just a
> > > screensaver or presence monitor), and that we don't track the
> > > lifecycle of the caller (don't handle if it calls SetIdle and then
> > > dies).
> >
> > ConsoleKit runs as root and monitors sessions. Why not just make the
> > idle stuff system wide?
>
> No, no and no. The authority on whether a session is idle in GNOME is
> gnome-screensaver.The information passed to CK is only advisory; IOW
> g-p-m in a session can/should trust the screen saver in the same session
> (for some definition of trust) but not necessarily CK in the system.
>
> IIRC, CK have a notion of what information it passes about a session
> that can be trusted (such as "is_active" and "what seat do I belong to")
> and what can't (e.g. "idle time", "number of unread messages"). The
> latter is supposed to only be used be login greeters for informational
> purposes - e.g. to display how long time a session have been idle, to
> display number of unread emails etc. etc.

Right.

The only place this is mentioned so far is in the header:
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=ConsoleKit.git;a=blob;h=c0c1d222d7ca5e342da11e0b31245f8599e37ca7;hb=51ff0be15b7bd4a48fd07ada4822f07ddc028af0;f=src/ck-session.h

Perhaps we need to be a little more obvious about this.  Maybe we
should add the word "hint" in the property name or something like
that.  For example, instead of ck_session_set_idle
ck_session_set_idle_hint.

Jon