Re: gnome power manager inhibit

[Alex Jones <alex weej com>]

I'd say there are three situations, not just "auto" and "manual":

1. when it decides for itself if it wants to suspend (idle);
2. when the user asks it to suspend (clicks "suspend"); and
3. when the user forces it to suspend (closes lid).

If any applications are inhibiting suspend in case 2, a dialogue should pop up and some protocol should allow the applications inhibiting to Do The Right Thing™ before suspension. Maybe we already do this?

But in case 3, this is unacceptable for the reasons you said -- the user confirmation should either be skipped over, or have a timeout on it.

On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 20:01 -0500, Scott J. Harmon wrote:
> Benjamin Gramlich wrote:
> > Isn't this discussion a bit moot since gnome has a "suspend inhibit"
> > applet that you can turn on in situations when you want to sit back
> > and watch a movie or download a .iso image?
> >
> No.  But I do have to say, I would rather the laptop suspend and kill my
> download or file move than have it catch fire in my backpack (i.e. I
> closed the lid while it was doing something inhibiting the suspend). 
> Surely auto-suspend operates differently than when *I* tell the machine
> to suspend (i.e. closing the lid, or clicking suspend).
>
> This whole conversation, I assumed, is about _auto_suspend, not manual
> suspend, right?
> >
> >
> > On 10/19/07, *Richard Hughes* <hughsient gmail com
> > <mailto:hughsient gmail com>> wrote:
> >
> >     On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 18:52 +0100, Odysseus Flappington wrote:
> >     > 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
> >     <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.
> >
> >     Well, we've discussed quite a few ways of doing this in the past -
> >     kpowersave just checks a blacklist of processes which is completely
> >     wrong way to do it in my opinion. Having a nice interface lets us do
> >     clever things.
> >
> >     > 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.
> >
> >     Surely you want that to suspend if there's been no movement for 15
> >     minutes? flash kills the battery life..
> >
> >     > - VLC when playing music.
> >
> >     Rhythmbox already inhibits gnome-power-manager.
> >
> >     > - Kino while capturing video through firewire.
> >
> >     Sure, it should do, although it's not dbusified IIRC.
> >
> >     > - Synaptic Package Manager while downloading packages!
> >
> >     PackageKit already does this :-) - I think the ubuntu update
> >     applet also
> >     does an inhibit.
> >
> >     > - While copying files in Nautilus!
> >
> >     A bug was files many months ago about that - Nautilus needed to
> >     pick up
> >     a dbus dep which the maintainers at the time didn't like. I think
> >     we can
> >     revisit that one now.
> >
> >     > 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.
> >
> >     They haven't. Asking each app "can i suspend?" doesn't scale, and it
> >     only takes one app to say "no" all the time to get a very hot closed
> >     laptop.
> >
> >     > 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?
> >
> >     Well, over time more and more stuff uses these interfaces. I think
> >     brassereo (sp?) already uses the interface when burning a CD. It's
> >     probably a 10 line patch to add this functionality into applications.
> >
> >     Richard.
> >
> >
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> >
> >
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>
> Scott.
>
> -- 
> "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Edsger Dijkstra
>
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