GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 502635
Full-screen application to mark Pidgin as "away"
Last modified: 2007-12-24 05:15:04 UTC
I just had a game of Frets On Fire, forgetting to mark myself as "Away" in Pidgin. Someone was trying to message me, and couldn't get through because the program I was using was a full-screen application. It would be a very useful feature for Metacity to automatically set my status across Gnome communication applications as "Away" or something similar, whenever a program goes full-screen. I recall someone from Gnome mentioning the same idea a year or two ago, albeit with the trigger being the gnome-screensaver kicking in.
An interesting idea. Normally it's the responsibility of the application to set this. First: there was talk at one point about creating a desktop-wide setting for this via dbus - it would disable the screensaver, put any im service in away mode (if they implement support obviously), disable email notifications, etc. Was that ever implemented? Second: is it a good idea for Metacity (or any other WM) to set this status when an app is opened in full screen mode automatically, or should it remain the app's responsibility to enter that mode? Are there any full-screen apps that would not want to toggle this settings? I would prefer that apps toggle this setting themselves, but is this something that the WM should maybe be responsible for / allowed to do for the app?
I would expect the right way to do this is in the IM app ... possibly the WM should set some kind of hint if anything is fullscreen on the current workspace, just to make it more efficient (keep the IM app from having to monitor all windows to see if any are fullscreen) But, I would be reluctant to add just that hint to the WM, unless someone were working on the whole problem (had also done the IM app patch and the EWMH patch)
Is this what bug 147419 was for? (I was about to mark as a duplicate, went to look up the bug number, and found out we closed it a while ago since nobody was working on it and I never had a clear picture of what should be done. So, yeah, we need someone doing what Havoc mentions...working on the whole picture.)
A couple of things spring to mind: 1. If we did this by the WM telling the IM client to go idle: there is no way at present to tell Pidgin to go "away" over dbus other than a Pidgin-specific interface (im.pidgin.purple.*) which is a particularly crappy idea (though of course we could do this immediately). This will presumably change when Telepathy is more prime-time. 2. If we did this by the IM client registering on some kind of hook from the WM: this would also let us do things like having some kind of cleverness when people changed workspace, which would presumably let us delegate bling to a compiz-alike daemon.