Bug 80089

Summary:	xdg-screensaver should control X11's screensaver in xfce as fallback
Product:	Portland	Reporter:	Simon Steinbeiss <simon>
Component:	xdg-utils	Assignee:	Portland Bugs <portland-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	23105
Attachments:	A simple patch to improve support for Xfce

Description Simon Steinbeiss 2014-06-16 09:22:34 UTC

Mostly XScreenSaver or gnome-screensaver have been used in Xfce-based distros in the past, so it was never a problem that xdg-screensaver doesn't handle Xfce in a special way.

However, e.g. Xubuntu switched to using light-locker (which doesn't do screensaving itself but relies on the builtin X11 extension), so it would be good if xdg-screensaver could handle the internal X11 screensaver as a fallback.

This is actually a very trivial thing to fix and I've already proposed this patch downstream in Ubuntu too. However, I hope we can get it included upstream too as it makes sense generally, not only for Xubuntu.


(Note that currently the X11 screensaver isn't handled as fallback, because it's only used when no DE at all is detected.)

Comment 1 Simon Steinbeiss 2014-06-16 09:32:37 UTC

Created attachment 101155 [details] [review]
A simple patch to improve support for Xfce

Comment 2 Rex Dieter 2014-06-16 11:54:53 UTC

I think I'd rather follow the approach of fixing the fallback problem (as mentioned at the end of the initial comment), rather than special-casing xfce (for a single distro)

Comment 3 Simon Steinbeiss 2014-06-16 12:02:04 UTC

Right, I guess you can also re-do the patch to *always* control the X11 screensaver if all above options fail.

Why I submitted a patch as is isn't because of a distro-specific problem, but because Xfce doesn't have its own screensaver implementation (and it's not planned), so controlling the X11 screensaver is always a good idea (in all distros) there (if xscreensaver and gnome-screensaver aren't detected).

I can't say that I know what's the status of LXDE (to name an example) - while I don't think they have their own solution currently, I guess their move to LXQt will change that again.

Comment 4 Simon Steinbeiss 2014-06-23 09:04:55 UTC

Ok, thought about this again over the weekend and I think the attached patch is how it should be done – just my humble opinion.

Thing is that xdg-screensaver already detects the DE, so why shouldn't it act on that knowledge? (So yeah, the patch is DE-specific, not distro-specific. Only the trigger for me writing this patch and the example was a distro :))
It's easy enough for other DEs to submit their own preferred solutions (after all, this is a bash script), so far this bug has only been reported against Xfce. I personally wouldn't like to change the current behavior for other DEs when it seems like the status quo is what is desired.

Comment 5 Rex Dieter 2015-01-04 22:22:06 UTC

Thanks, committed,

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-utils/commit/?id=0f06aadc8696f3e9234687bbc93b50a3f724b822

Comment 6 Simon Steinbeiss 2015-01-04 22:30:27 UTC

Thanks for pushing the patch!

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