Please standardize Screen saver DBus interfaces

[Ali Abdallah]

Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> 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.
>   

This is exactly what i mean, a media player in principle should only 
prevent the screen saver from activating itself, the saver then sends 
DBus signal over the bus with the inhibit status, then if there is a 
power manager running, optionally it can make use of this signal for 
example to disable DPMS, or to reset user inactivity sleep. I said, if 
there is power manager running, because for example on my desktop 
computer which i use to watch TV/movies i have no power manager (because 
i don't need it) and i still want to use the screen saver inhibit interface.

Gnome screen saver and kscreensaver both have inhibits, but my problem 
here is the fact that kscreensaver uses org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver 
(which seems to be a standard name for me), while gnome uses 
org.gnome.ScreenSaver.


I filed a bug for gnome screen saver, but they are saying that there is 
no agreement of having this as a standard name, they add also it is nice 
to standardize!

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=577661


> 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
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