saving desktop

[Benedikt Meurer]

Rich Shepard wrote:
>> In Xfce 3, there was no session manager, it was xfwm (the window manager)
>> that was restarting apps - It looked like a session manager, it tasted
>> like a session manager but it wasn't a session manager (although it was
>> restoring the session, most of the time)
> 
>   So, when you disassembled the window manager into it's component parts 
> for
> version 4, that piece fell out and rolled under the desk.
> 
>   If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and tasts like a duck, ...
> it's actually just a chicken, eh?

What xfwm did was basicly X11R5 session management (with a few 
exception, from what I see in the code). This "session management 
protocol" was a pain in the neck, but it offered the advantage of being 
plain simple to implement in both the application and the session manager.

xfce4-session provides X11R6 session management (the current standard) 
and legacy session management (X11R5 sm and an additional fallback for 
non-sm aware apps). xfce4-session isn't perfect, yet (I doubt that any 
software will ever be perfect anyways). It has some oddities that need 
to be addressed (esp. with slow starting apps like KDE apps or OO.org), 
but it does a quite good job already (IMHO).

It could have been implemented in xfwm4 as well, sure, but that wouldn't 
fit the Xfce/Unix policy of modularity.

> Thanks,
> Rich

HTH,
Benedikt