Re: xscreensaver, any plan do drop it !!

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 11:28 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
> gnome-screensaver is about a lot more than "making it look better." 
> Let's try to move the conversation past that point.

(Yay, very happy to see this happening!)

> I've tried to put some information in the Wiki:
> http://live.gnome.org/GnomeScreensaver
> 
> I'll be happy to try to answer any specific questions and criticism.

1. How do see this being integrated with power management solutions like
e.g. the existing gnome-power project and some of the ideas that were
discussed at GUADEC [1]? 

To me it seems like there's some common ground in e.g. detecting user
being idle (and the user is not idle when e.g. watching a movie or doing
a presentation so we need app input (maybe just --poke, but is that
secure?)) and enforcing policy (blanking screen, invoking screensaver /
locking workstation, putting into suspend, asking the user to
authenticate when resuming / unlocking screensaver).

Also, ideally the user would have a single dialog where the following
timeouts a-d can be configured: 

 a) invoke screensaver; 
 b) blank screen; 
 c) suspend-to-ram   (may not be available)
 d) suspend-to-disk  (may not be available)

(IIRC, clarkbw even suggests a single widget with multiple sliders and
using that timeout(a) < timeout(b) < timeout (c))

Working for a distributor, I think it would be convenient to somehow
combine these two efforts (even on the source-code level), but I dunno.
What do you think?

2. How does this integrate with fast-user switching? My question mainly
comes from ignorance, I think, all I did was install gnome-screensaver
from CVS and I was able to log in as another user from the lock dialog
(yay!). However, I missed some kind of notification icon in both
sessions to switch back / do a new login. 

So I guess I'm asking for the bigger picture of fast user switching and
gnome-screensaver. (of course, if all of fast-user-switching is not part
of gnome-screensaver and/or you are concentrating on other bits than
f-u-s there is no need to answer this now)

Great work!

Cheers,
David

[1] : mjg59's paper is linked from here
      http://live.gnome.org/Stuttgart2005_2fPresentationSlides