[SDL] SDL tampers with display power settings on the sly

[Erik]

Solra Bizna skrev:
> SIGKILL a fullscreen app that's grabbed the mouse. Like the
> screensaver, what results is not something SDL or any other client
> code can fix. It's a fundamental problem with X11.
> If you really want to fix this problem on Linux, beg the Xorg
> developers for some sort of "temporarily disable screensaver while
> this client is running" command.

Like I just wrote in another reply, that feature would be of very 
limited usefulness (movie players who simply start, play and terminate). 
We would have to stop and think a while about what we really want to 
achieve here.

The situation is that a user has configured his system to turn off the 
display after a certain time of inactivity. Since that is an order from 
the user, we must respect that unless we have a good reason. That reason 
is that we are updating the display with some content that the user may 
want to see even though he has not interacted with the system for a 
while. This is the case when a movie (animation) is played.

So the solution would be something like this: Each time the application 
updates the display with a new animation frame, it marks that update 
with a special flag, indicating that this is the kind of thing that the 
user may be watching even though he has not interacted with the system
for a while. The X server then resets the screensaver countdown.