Please standardize Screen saver DBus interfaces

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 05/15/2009 12:33 AM, Ali Abdallah wrote:
> Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
>> On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 1:36 PM, Ali Abdallah<aliov at xfce.org>  wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> It seems that the screen saver interfaces and bus name are not standard
>>> yet! however i see this very important, since a media player shouldn't
>>> guess which screen saver is running on the current session in order to
>>> use its inhibit interface.
>>>
>> Ideally it's the power management interface you use to inhibit a
>> screen so this should be agreed upon instead. Screensaver is just one
>> of possible implementation details of the power saving mechanism. And
>> a pretty but useless one as it tends to actually drain more power ;)
>>
> Power manager inhibit interface is kind of standard,
> org.freedesktop.PowerManagement is used everywhere with some specific
> interfaces on it written by Richard Huges if i'm not wrong.
>
> What i'm speaking about is the fact that a screen saver should have an
> inhibit interface so things like media players can make use of this to
> avoid locking the screen by the running screen saver, that is, than the
> screen saver should have a inhibit changed DBus signal to inform other
> application that locking is currently disabled, same thing as the power
> managers these days do, almost all of them have inhibit interface +
> inhibit changed signal.

Further... you *don't* want a media player (etc.) calling Inhibit on the 
power manager.  You want to tell the screen saver to stay out of the way 
for a while, but if the machine (for example) is critically low on 
battery, you probably still want it to go into sleep or hibernate mode 
to save your current state.

On the other hand, if you're burning a DVD, and your battery drops to 
3%, you may be sitting there, hoping against hope that it'll complete 
burning before it hits 0% so you don't create a coaster and you can 
hibernate at the last minute.  This reasoning is a bit stronger if it's 
a blu-ray disc you're burning, since those things are likely *expensive*.

Though I suppose it may not matter where this interface goes, thought 
InhibitScreensaver seems odd in a power management interface to me...

	-b