Verify that camera activities close the camera device when not in use.

[jg]

The camera activity, Etoys, and any other camera activity should close the camera device when idle, or when they are not the visible activity on the screen.

This is to ensure no interference between activities, along with minimizing power usage.

[jg]

The verification failed.

Bug #1475 has the current bug report.

[erikb]

We are waiting for a better sugar solution to knowing which activity is "active". Using a focus listener to turn the camera on/off is unacceptable since showing the task frame causes a focus event (and shuts down the camera).

This thread has further information: http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2007-April/002069.html

[tomeu]

Yesterday we added an 'active' property to sugar.activity.Activity. The shell will set it to True or False when the user switches between activites. You can listen to changes on the 'notify::active' signal.

Is this enough?

[kimquirk]

Moving to next software release, Trial-2.

[jg]

X can tell you when you are "visible", rather than having input focus. I would argue that etoys should use this as how to key on whether it should release the hardware than using focus.

I think it is unwise to have dependencies on Sugar when unnecessary, and I do not it think it necessary in this case.

[erikb]

bug filed to request fix the firing of notify::active events in 2026

[jg]

Heh...

This does not have to wait for Sugar.

As I pointed out in a camera bug on this issue, the ICCCM/EWMH documents define ways you can know you are visible or not.

So at least for many applications, they should be keying on visibility and not have to deal with any sugar information. This will help portability to non-sugar environments.

This won't always be true: but for activities where it does they should definitely use the standard X mechanisms and not any sugar mechanisms.

Chris, are there any offending applications at this time? If there are, there should be trac issues for each of them.

[cjl]

Is there any point in keeping tinderbox bugs open? Is this even a tinderbox bug?

[cjb]

Closing.