Re: gnome-screensaver

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Wed, 2006-02-15 at 12:54 +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> We are however facing a serious regression now

Technically xscreensaver was never part of GNOME. All you do is to prove
my point below...

> PS. sorry for the capitals, but I am trying to make the case for our vanilla
> tree not what the major vendors have decided that they're going to do.

Well, I'm not sure that many vendors nor users really care that much
about what we include in the desktop set - they usually omit some
software in the desktop and include lots of other useful bits. I think
the picture you're trying to paint of our vendors is sad.. surely they
know what to do, this is hardly rocket science [1].

So I don't really see your point, sorry, and what seriously worries me
is your rather silly suggestion about adding duplicate UI in
gnome-screensaver. Do you really want to add UI that is most likely to
go away in 2.16 if and when g-p-m should receive the questionable honor
of being included in the desktop set?

What's much more interesting, I think, is making sure that the various
D-BUS API's exported by g-s and g-p-m goes into the developer platform
at some point (even propose the API's on fd.o) so we can offer a stable
ABI for power management and inhibiting the screen saver. Now that would
be useful. 

Discussing what's in or out of the desktop set isn't really interesting
to me; I think at best it's [2] some blessing, a pat on the back of the
authors and a more rigorous development schedule (observing freezes
etc.). But that is just what I think.

    David

[1] : one of a) include g-p-m; b) don't include g-p-m; instead just
patch g-s to talk to the X server directly rather than via g-p-m; c)
ship xscreensaver instead.

[2] : Apart from docs and the user guide... As Shaun mentions, docs
already has issues as vendors ship and patch what they want.. I do think
this is a serious problem but I don't have a solution to that handy,
sorry...