Re: gnome-screensaver 0.0.23

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 14:15 -0500, William Jon McCann wrote:
> Richard Hughes wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 11:26 -0500, William Jon McCann wrote: 
> >>* 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.
> 
> That is correct.  I renamed the method precisely because of this 
> confusion - it was never really giving you the correct idle state or time.

Sure, agreed.

> > 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.
> 
> I just committed some changes that add a SessionIdleChanged D-Bus 
> signal.  This signal is emitted after detecting the session is idle for 
> longer than the screensaver timeout.

This is probably a good idea -- but maybe a separate value (i.e. gconf
key) might be better so there can be differing timeouts. I don't think
this has to be settable in g-s (and could probably be hard coded to a
one minute.)

>   The getSessionIdleTime method 
> returns the time since the session went idle.

This is really good, thanks. I'll code this support into g-p-m now. :-)

> In the case where screensaver activation is enabled there will be two 
> D-Bus signals emitted when the session goes idle: SessionIdleChanged, 
> ActiveChanged.  When the screensaver activation is disabled, only 
> SessionIdleChanged will be emitted.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> CVS should now have proper idle detection.  Please give it a try and let 
> me know if this works for you.

Will do, thanks.

Richard.