Comment 10 for bug 1321750

This developer has been persuaded he's wrong on many occasions, but this isn't so far one of them. If I were in favour of damning users I wouldn't bother releasing my work publically, or at least I wouldn't bother commenting on bug reports I disagreed with.

I understand that there are genuine use cases for the old features; I'm not convinced that they're worth maintaining in terms of UI complexity, code complexity, power consumption &c.

VLC will happily disable the screen saver on playback of any sort, as I've already pointed out, so you're OK there.

For background jobs (MythTV commercial removal as you mentioned; backup and system update as others have mentioned) I don't think Caffeine was ever the right tool: batch jobs should use batch commands, and all those use cases want to prevent sleep/hibernation, but not the screensaver. It sounds like what's needed here is a wrapper command:

stay-awake COMMAND ARGUMENT...

which runs COMMAND with sleep inhibited. If you don't mind the screen saver being inhibited too, I believe such a command can be constructed with xdg-screensaver. One thing I will shortly be working on is patching xdg-screensaver to support the DBus API that Caffeine uses, so that Caffeine itself can simply use xdg-screensaver; this will restore compatibility with a lot more desktop environments too (see bug #1266953). That would also enable a command to be written that would I think better serve background uses.