[Portland] Re: RELEASED: xdg-utils 1.0 beta2

[William Jon McCann]

Hi Waldo,

Bastian, Waldo wrote:
> Yippie, Xdg-utils 1.0 beta2 is released!
> 
> Head over to
> http://portland.freedesktop.org/download/xdg-utils-1.0beta2.tgz to play
> with this puppie.

I'm happy to see that some of the problems I had with the 
xdg-screensaver script [1] have been addressed.  However, some have not.

This iteration of the script has the following:

        suspend)
         # Don't know how to suspend properly
         gnome-screensaver-command --exit > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
         result=0
         ;;

It is unacceptable to cause the screensaver daemon process to exit.  I'm 
surprised that you would release a script that does this.

If you are set on using this script based approach,  I think that you 
can do something with the gnome-screensaver-command --inhibit option, if 
it exists, or else a loop using the --poke option.

To reiterate some of my previous objections:

* The terminology the script uses is faulty.  Inhibit is clearly a 
better verb to use for temporarily attempting to restrain screensaver 
activation.  Nothing is really "suspended".  It is critical that even 
when the screensaver activation is inhibited that the screen be able to 
lock.

* You must make a distinction between activation and explicit locking. 
For example, you should provide both --lock and --activate options.

* The window-id approach is broken and reveals implementation details.

* It is difficult to promote two standard approaches for screensaver 
control.  The reasoning that has been given for why this isn't an issue 
is that the scripts are for immediate deployment and the D-Bus API is 
for future deployment.  This script won't work at all on any existing 
deployment that uses GNOME < 2.14 since it doesn't support xscreensaver.


Jon

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2006-July/008404.html