[PATCH] Turn Powerdevil suspend notification into a dialog

[Aurélien Gâteau]

Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On September 22, 2009, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
>> What do you think about this?
> 
> the workspace is being designed with a no-dialog goal. dialogs are 
> interruptions, can be confused as coming from the application the user is 
> working on and not well associated with the workspace itself.

I agree. I discussed this with Celeste before implementing it and she 
suggested to use the same kind of interface as the logout, shutdown, 
reboot window from ksmserver.

I gave it a try, but it was:
- Hackish: I had Powerdevil send dbus calls to ksmserver to show the 
ShutdownDialog in a "suspend" mode.
- Didn't look right: While testing I realized using this interface was 
not very useful because at the time it shows up, Powerdevil has already 
disabled compositing, so you don't get smooth transitions.

I could make the dialog use Plasma theme so that it looks more 
integrated with the workspace.

> 
> a dialog gets in your way, may end up accidentally triggered due to unexpected 
> focus change and a dialog for this would erode integration with the rest of 
> the desktop shell

This is why I made it so the dialog would not steal focus.

> 
> plasma-desktop is (trying to be) about visual and functional consistency.
> from a visual design perspective, a dialog for this is a failure.
> from a functional consistency perspective, it is also a step backwards.
> 
> so ... first off:
> 
> * is this a _real_ problem? how many people have not seen this and / or failed 
> to react properly (honestly, in my observations of people using KDE 4, the 
> power notifications are perceived as already TOO intrusive!)

It was a real problem for me, and when I brought this up to the 
#kubuntu-devel channel I found others felt the same. Celeste also agreed 
on this.

It's true I didn't find bug reports on this in Bugzilla or Launchpad, 
but I nevertheless found two related reports which would be solved by 
the patch:

- Stopping suspend by clicking on notification doesn't work when not 
using plasma notifications
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=191617

- click to block auto-suspend does not work
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/powerdevil/+bug/356924

Note that it only changes the "your computer is going to suspend in x 
seconds" notification. It does not alter the "power cord has been 
plugged in" or any other notifications.

To be completely honest, it is also a bigger problem for us (yet again) 
because of the possibility to use notify-osd together with KDE on 
Kubuntu. Still I believe this Powerdevil change makes sense even for 
upstream KDE.

Aurelien