Re: [gpm] Re: Gnome 2.16 Module Proposal: GNOME Power Manager

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Fri, 2006-04-14 at 21:35 +0200, Stefan Seyfried wrote:
> But you need the same daemon twice. Once for GNOME, once for KDE. That's
> code duplication, i'd say.

This is the KDE and GNOME way of doing things.

There are 3 ways to write a desktop application.

* using KDE technologies (C++, KDevelop, QT) so that it integrates well,
(but looks and feels wrong in GNOME)
* using GNOME technologies (C, Glade, GTK+) so that it integrates well,
(but looks and feels wrong in KDE)
* using custom technologies so that program does not integrate or feel
right with either KDE or GNOME.

Sharing anything other than a API spec is a kiss of death in my opinion.

> The problem is simply that you will always have some legacy applications
> that do not know about DBUS, inhibitors etc. RealPlayer anyone?

There's no reason RealPlayer wouldn't use a new inhibit interface if we
said "this will make RealPlayer work with GNOME"

> But of course you can leave the blacklist part out of gnome-powersave if
> this is the only problem ;-)

I don't think a blacklist is the way to go in my opinion. And it's
certainly not the only problem.

> > The way this works with gnome-screensaver and gnome-power-manager is
> > that we have inhibitor interfaces in on the D-BUS session bus. 
> > 
> > So if I'm the Nautilus file manager I can simply take a lock on the
> > inhibitor interface on g-p-m when copying large files, see
> > 
> >  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334806
> > 
> > for details. Similar, if I'm the Totem movie player, I take a lock on
> > the gnome-screensaver inhibitor interface to prevent the screen saver
> > from starting. It's *that* simple. There's a couple of other interfaces
> > planned like being able to do an action before suspend or hibernate (if
> > I'm a word processor I want to quick-save etc.)
> 
> This is a good idea, but pretty orthogonal to the discussed question, or
> do i understand this completely wrong?

Well, it's what gnome-power-manager and gnome-screensaver have done
since 2-14, and relies on session daemons to control the *per-session*
applications.

> Btw. it might be that i misunderstand "enforcing policy" here, since i
> am not a native english speaker.

So the admin can lock down who can suspend or shutdown. This is already
possible in HAL by adjusting the dbus permissions.

> I actually have a feeling that the powersave guys have seen much more
> of g-p-m than the g-p-m guys have seen of powersave ;-)

I've followed powersave development for some time actually -- it's very
interesting what features have been added over the last few months.

Richard.