[gpm] gnome power manager inhibit

["Odysseus Flappington" <deriziotis gmail com>]

Hello,

I am emailing to voice an opinion, and perhaps start a discussion regarding how suspend/hibernate works in Gnome. It seems to me that Gnome keeps making my laptop suspend/hibernate while it's in the middle of doing things which should be stopping it from sleeping. 

I understand that it is each application's responsibility to inhibit the computer from sleeping while in use (

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GnomePowerManagerInactiveSleep
). Forgive me if I'm being brash, however, this seems to me to be a counter-intuitive way of doing things.

Would it not be a much better solution to have the OS check what the computer is doing, and then determine whether to sleep or not? Rather than have each application do it.

The reason I ask, is that there are so many applications in Linux which do not properly inhibit/uninhit gnome from sleeping (off the top of my head: playing music in VLC, caoturing video in Kino, copying files, Songbird, Totem in windowed mode, Flash in Firefox, and quite a few others). I have 
never experienced this problem on Windows, so, I'm assuming they've found a better way of doing this. I would think that perhaps, the inhibit/uninhibit method of doing this isn't the most elegant solution.

I am not an experienced developer, but let me throw an idea out there for the sake of discussion. Perhaps a better solution would be to query the audio, video and i/o devices to see if they're in use, before putting the computer to sleep? Is this even possible? What would the criteria for device usage be if a solution like this were to be considered.

Are there any other ideas regarding the design of the idle/sleep mechanism in GPM being thrown around? What are all your thoughts?

Regards,
Alexander H Deriziotis