Gnome 2.20 released

[bruce89]

How hard do you think it would be to make the appropriate patch? I believe he has said it should be a simple task if someone just does it. I'm learning C++ in a class ATM, and I'm wondering if I should just get proficient enough to write said patch and do it myself. Probably look at how xscreensaver does it and do something similar. I don't care THAT much, but things that are broken for no real reason, certainly bother me, a lot.

GNOME uses C though.

But don't do it, it will clutter things up, maybe selection of random screensavers would be nice, but it can be done with gconf-editor ATM.

[Wolki]

How hard do you think it would be to make the appropriate patch? I believe he has said it should be a simple task if someone just does it. I'm learning C++ in a class ATM, and I'm wondering if I should just get proficient enough to write said patch and do it myself. Probably look at how xscreensaver does it and do something similar. I don't care THAT much, but things that are broken for no real reason, certainly bother me, a lot.

Well, since the gss config tool is written in C the patch would have to be in that language as well. That makes it an automatic "very hard" for a lot of people

For someone proficient at c, it shouldn't be too hard. gss uses the fdo menu system for configuration ( .menu files for enabling/disabling screensavers, .desktop files to launch screensavers, configuration happens through command line parameters there), which is well-described at freedektop.org, and should have libraries available.

Then you'd have to deal with two things, actually displaying the config options and (maybe) handling with the config options that cannot specified via parameters (xscreensaver is apparently quire messy here, personally I'd just drop these).
In xss, the config dialogs are autogenerated from xml files containing the options, which is a bit iffy and has a couple of problems. Might get better results with handcoding the config dialogs for the various themes, though that probably wouldn't be very extensible.

That's just my amateurish analysis though, if you're really interested I suggest contacting the gss developer, as I'm sure he already has ideas and hints; and obviously far more knowledge than I.

[edit]

But don't do it, it will clutter things up, maybe selection of random screensavers would be nice, but it can be done with gconf-editor ATM.

That would work, but last time I tried it you had to redo that edit after each time you ste´arted gnome-screensaver-preferences. A more permanent solution would involve editing the screensaver.menu file correctly, which wil completely disable unwanted screensavers.

[coolen]

Main features for me:

Improved keyring (perhaps this will wolve the issue on my laptop where it asks me every week or so for the network key).
Locked screen messaging (how handy!).
User profile editing (YES!).

I also like the pie-chart representation of your hard drive. Just some nice visual aids to make the whole experience more friendly.