Re: gnome-screensaver 0.0.23

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 11:26 -0500, William Jon McCann wrote: 
> Hello,
> 
> I just released a new version of gnome-screensaver (0.0.23).  There are 
> a few changes worth mentioning here:

<snip>

> * The removal of the getIdle D-Bus method.
> * The renaming of getIdleTime D-Bus method to getActiveTime.

getActiveTime allows to to get the time the screensaver has been
running, but what if the user sets the screensaver to disabled? Then we
get no ActiveChanged signal, nor can g-p-m use g-s to find out the idle
time of the mouse and keyboard.

In an ideal world, I would like g-s to emit "IdleStateChanged true" when
idle for > 60 seconds (and false when the keyboard is pressed or the
mouse is then moved) -- then other programs can then call a method
getIdleTime() to get the time the keyboard/mouse has been idle. This
minimises DBUS signal traffic.

This would be independent of the screensaver. This information is
already calculated in g-s (for the screensaver internals), and I'm
guessing it would be fairly easy to export it again. 

I really don't want to duplicate all that nasty X11 code in g-p-m just
to get the idle time when the screensaver is disabled.

Comments please,

Thanks, Richard.