Re: Welcome

[William Jon McCann <mccann jhu edu>]

Hi Richard,

Richard Hughes wrote:
> Well, I think we should sort out the DontScreensave *or* Suspend
> thing...
>
> Typical user plays a file in Totem for 1 hour 20 minutes. Screensave is
> set to 15 minutes, and auto-suspend is set to 1 hour.
>
> Totem needs to tell gnome-screensaver *and* gnome-power-manager to not
> do their actions.
>
> What about leaving your DBUS api for disabling and enabling *just* the
> screensaver, and use g-p-m to call g-s in the generic case.
>
> For instance:
>
> Totem starts to play a film.
> Totem calls org.gnome.PowerManager.Veto()
>
> When g-p-m receives this signal, it calls the disable method for g-s,
> and disables the auto-suspend or hibernate magic.
>
> Totem can then finish playing the file, and call
> org.gnome.PowerManager.Allow()
>
> (or it could just quit/crash/whatever, where the DBUS session connection
> will let us clean up automatically)
>
> What is consensus on this staggered idea?

OK, so this is one of the liminal regions.  The question is who should 
be doing what.  This gets even more interesting when you think about 
multiple sessions and/or users.

My view is that totem should not care about anything outside the scope 
of the desktop session.  The screensaver, for the most part, exists 
entirely within the scope of the session.  The scope of power management 
is not entirely within the session.  Therefore, totem should disable the 
session behavior: screensaver activation.  In fact, it already does this 
[1].

I also think that the power management should not activate until every 
session becomes idle [2].  In this case, g-p-m should not do anything 
until it receives the ActiveChanged message on the session bus.  Then it 
should start counting down for the configured actions if any.

What do you think?

Jon

[1] See http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/totem/src/totem-session.c?view=markup

[2] Or perhaps, when the session on "console" becomes idle.  This is one 
of the places where we need some kind of system level daemon (this might 
be gdm or something else).  This is very much related to the problem of 
device ownership.  Also see 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-July/msg00170.html