Comment 13 for bug 310351

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).