gnome power manager inhibit

["Odysseus Flappington" <deriziotis gmail com>]

Hi everyone,

It appears to me that how Gnome Power Manager determines whether the computer idle before it suspends/hibernates could be better designed. I understand that it is each application's responsibility to inhibit the computer from sleeping while in use (
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GnomePowerManagerInactiveSleep ), however there are so few Gnome apps that actually implement this properly that I'm beginning to believe there must be a better way of doing this.

Just a few example of Gnome putting the computer to sleep while doing stuff, these are off the top of my head and go alongside countless others that I've come across: 
- Firefox when playing Flash.
- VLC when playing music.
- Kino while capturing video through firewire.
- Synaptic Package Manager while downloading packages!
- While copying files in Nautilus!

This is pretty basic laptop stuff, and since equivalent bugs haven't been reported on Windows and that generally I've never come across these problems, I would conclude that they've found a more effective way of implementing this. Are there any plans to look at the design of the suspend/hibernate mechanisms that Gnome implements and re-work them? What consensus has been reached regarding this issue already?

Thanks,
Alex