Re: [gpm] Re: gnome-screensaver 0.0.23

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Fri, 2005-12-30 at 18:57 +0100, Jaap Haitsma wrote:
> Richard Hughes wrote:
> > 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,
> 
> I've been discussing this topic with Richard already. We don't share the 
> same vision on this. For the people who have not followed that 
> discussion. Here's my view.
> 
> I don't really see why gnome power manager should depend on 
> gnome-screensaver for getting the idle time, because as a user for some 
> reason I might not want to install gnome-screensaver. A better solution 
> is to have one C file exporting the function
> 
> int get_keyboard_mouse_idle_time ()
> 
> If that file is part of gnome-screensaver, gnome-power-manager would 
> just copy that file and put it in a cut-n-paste directory like the way
> it's currently done with libegg files

That's easy with libegg stuff, but the X11 stuff requires lots of clever
configure foo in the packaging, with lots of options to configure.

If you look at the X11 event code it's not a nice place to be. This may
be however the route we have to take. Hence the open discussion (across
multiple mailing lists, sorry).

Richard.