[maemo-developers] backgrounding/lock QA fail

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 11:02, Attila Csipa <maemo at csipa.in.rs> wrote:
>
> I see we have a few apps (especially ports and stuff using SDL) that do not
> know how to suspend themselves and therefore it fails the QA. Now, the
> problem is that often it is non-trivial to fix/support this, and it's not
> that easy to point people to the right resources (due to the number of
> technologies involved).

I think there is a gap for a wiki page on "saving power", though;
which talks about the two main mechanisms for *most* apps: the OSSO
DBus signal for display blanking/locking and the Gtk+ signal for the
window going into the background.

> Now, I was thinking, as this sort of bug is a kind of a 'be aware' type,
> is that maybe we could allow these to pass if they made it clear to the
> user they are not able to suspend themselves. A popup after install, or
> a Hildon banner before/during startup... that sort of thing

I don't like this idea, and would rather have some mechanism
(super-testers?) about having specific exceptions. For example, an
application which is quick to start and usually takes all the user's
focus.

Two technical options would be:

  1) A daemon which applications could register their process ID with,
     when the display locks they would be forcefully SIGSTOPped.

  2) An LD_PRELOAD hack which apps could use to get themselves
     forcefully SIGSTOPped when certain conditions are met.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
Maemo Community Council chair