Temporary deactivation of a subscriber

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Hey!

I'm thinking about possibly useful feature that I'm currently missing in ROS and would like to hear your opinion on it. I'm currently writing a node that subscribes to a pointcloud-Topic but in fact only uses a pointcloud every minute or so. It would be useful to be able to temporarily disable the subscriber so that the pointcloud-publisher can use getNumSubscribers to decide if the CPU-hungry stereo-algorithm has to be run or not.

This effect could currently only be achieved by calling subscriber.shutdown and subscribing again later but that requires to store the topic_name and more boilerplate code.

Who would use this feature?