The SimulateActivity interface is not actually specified in the fd.o spec: http://people.freedesktop.org/~hadess/idle-inhibition- spec/re01.html
The only methods offered there are Inhibit and UnInhibit. SimulateActivity is not implemented in GNOME 3, so the patch will not work there. The route I suggest will work on any system implementing the fd.o spec. In general, I think that while one does have to be careful about dependencies in general. First, it is not unreasonable to assume that any system running one of the desktop environments that implement this DBus interface will have Perl installed. Of course, the Perl DBus implementation is not part of core Perl; I would be happy to make my patch emit a helpful error if it can't find the module. Secondly, for most users, xdg-utils will be installed from a system package, which can depend on the relevant Perl package (which is not large); as well, of course, as depending on Perl (since Perl is installed by default on many systems, e.g. Ubuntu and Mac OS X, the latter dependency will often not be needed). -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to xdg-utils in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/310351 Title: Kubuntu screensaver xdg-screensaver broken Status in Xdg-utils: Unknown Status in xdg-utils package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Status in xdg-utils package in Debian: Confirmed Bug description: Binary package hint: kscreensaver xdg-screensaver returns "bad call" for all values tested. Looking at the script, I'd guess it is because it detects the KDE desktop and tries to use dcop when KDE4 has moved to dbus, but that's just a guess. For example: $ xdg-screensaver activate call failed lsb_release -rd -> Ubuntu 8.10 Flavor is kbuntu To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/xdg-utils/+bug/310351/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp