[Spice-devel] Spice bug62033, Gnome bug 680195 rework: new inhibitors for desktop effects

[Fedor Lyakhov]

Hi Bastien,

I'm working on a bug/enhancement for Spice reported by Zeeshan:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62033 (Means to detect
local-only). It is related to Gnome bug
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680195 (Disable animations
when on slow VNC or spice)

We've discussed possible solutions for this issue in the spice-devel
mailing list (the last message in the thread -
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/spice-devel/2013-September/014562.html).

Summary of the issue:
Need to disable desktop effects (animation, wallpaper, font smoothing)
when user is connected via Spice over slow network.

Proposed solution:
(i) Use existing "--spice-disable-effects" option which works for
Windows guests already: implement such functionality for Linux guests.
The feature can be invoked from oVirt, so it will be useful.
(ii) Implement the feature via inhibitors: Spice vdagent to call
DE-provided inhibitor-styled D-Bus API to inhibit animation, wallpaper
and font smoothing. This way the feature will be supported at any DE
which provides such API - hopefully we can get support for Gnome3, KDE
(5?) and Unity (minimum list).

Does the solution seem reasonable for you? Any comments would be appreciated.

I have few additional questions:
1. I know you have been involved into Inhibitor API discussions with
KDE folks about a year ago (I've seen only
http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2012-November/012580.html
thread). Could you please summarize the current status of this API in
Gnome and maybe KDE (including all inhibitors, not only screen saver)?
I cannot find any relevant documentation about this...

2. What do you think about adding new inhibitors for our needs? Where
should I start from? Is the implementation need to be added to
gnome-desktop-settings?


-- 
Best regards,
Fedor