[Portland] Screen saver questions / proposal

[Jeremy White]

Hi Folks,

I'm working on an application that needs to set itself as a screensaver.

And, since we have the handy dandy xdg-screensaver utility, I thought
I would write some code to extend it for that purpose.

I've made a fairly brief foray into existing screen savers
in what appear to be modern versions of Gnome and KDE
(at least as packaged by Fedora and Ubuntu, forgive me if
I've ignored others efforts).

Both seem to be moving away from the old xscreensaver style,
and to a .desktop format; that is, you add a category of
Screensaver and at least an Action of Root, and you're all set.
Seems slick and like a good idea.

The only thing that jarred me was that there didn't seem to
be a standard place to put the .desktop file to turn it into
a screen saver; it was one place in KDE, another in Gnome,
and only KDE seemed to have a per user place.

So first question:  wouldn't it make more sense to just allow
those .desktop files to be anywhere in the menu hierarchy?
That way, I only have to install one .desktop file, and just
extend it to indicate that my app can be a screen saver.

Now, if I wave a magic wand and assume that the issue
of 'installing' a screen saver is taken care of,
then I imagine the following useful extensions to xdg-screensaver:

  xdg-screensaver get
  xdg-screensaver set saver1 [saver2] [...] [savern]
  xdg-screensaver configure

The get command prints the currently established screen saver name
(or savers, if there is more than one).

The set command sets the screen saver.

The configure command would simply activate the screen saver configuration tool
for the current WM.

I contemplated that, instead of this, we could introduce some form of
xdg-config tool that can be used to query/set basic system
information.  I can imagine that would be useful around a lot
of general purpose system configuration tasks (e.g. get/set
proxy info and so on).  But I had a feeling that was going to be
a rats nest and might not be safe to propose.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Are we starting to make the xdg-utils tools
a bit too esoteric, or is that simple enough?

Cheers,

Jeremy

p.s.  If there are lists where this has been discussed in more detail, I'd
appreciate a clue bat.  A fast Google didn't seem to reveal any obvious
discussion of these features.