Gnome Screensaver issues?

[Tristan Wibberley]

Oliver Grawert wrote:

> since nearly every app out there uses its own mechanism to make sure the
> screensaver doesnt kick in, you'd have to rewrite xscreensaver ...
> note that every app i touched until now has an implementation for
> xscreensaver and a different one for kscreensaver, gnome-screensaver is
> simply a new implementation that actually needs to be added there, there
> is no global reciepe you can use ...

No, but there are only three commonly used methods. xscreensaver, 
kscreensaver, and gnome-screensaver - then god knows how many 
applications. The best solution is to choose one of the screensavers 
(gnome-screensaver has been chosen), and port some of the code from the 
other two, rather than porting the code from, eg, totem to all the other 
applications

> please file bugs on apps where you see it, i agree that a general
> solution should be found for all screensavers, but due to the three
> different approaches the screensavers currently take this will require
> some time and some flexibility from upstream (which you wont see for
> xscreensaver) to adopt such a solution.

Does it need to be done upstream? And does it need to be done for 
xscreensaver? It is gnome-screensaver that has been chosen, so it's only 
that one that needs to be patched.

This change would make gnome-screensaver justifiably technically better 
than both xscreensaver and kscreensaver. Then the only argument left for 
those that don't like gnome-screensaver will be that of configurability 
which is only a policy decision and not one of technical merit. But at 
least the technical problems will be solved for Dapper, for the 
enterprises that have existing binaries of programs that shouldn't start 
the screensaver. Those users will find that Ubuntu just works for them.

-- 
Tristan Wibberley