Startup timeouts for non existent programs

[James Westby]

Hi all,

I booted into KDE for the first time the other day, and was shocked at
how quickly it started. This made me realise that my XFCE was starting
really slowly, and I'd just been putting up with it. 

I wanted to find out what was going on, and to take the opportunity to
familiarise myself with the code. 

Eventually I realised the problem was that my sessions contained
references to xftaskbar4 and xfce4-iconbox that are no longer on my 
system. When trying to start these the session manager was timing out 
and so creating a long delay for both of them.

I have some ideas about how to avoid some of this.

1) At the very least log a warning, so that an observant user can do
something about it.

2) Remove the offending entry from the session. I realise that it may
only be a temporary fault and will annoy and mystify users when their
config keeps changing.

3) When moving to 4.4 purge all references to xftaskbar4 in sessions.
This could be optional if the user wanted to use two versions, but at
least then they would know why it was happening.

4) Implement an equivalent to [ -f $program && -x $program ]. I'm not
sure that this one is even possible, but if it were it would be the most
robust solution.

I realise that this might not be that important on the scale of things,
but (correct me if I am wrong) users migrating to 4.4 could well have
xftaskbar in their sessions, and so would be disappointed that the new
release takes 10s longer to startup.

I would appreciate any thoughts, and I wouldn't be adverse to coding a
patch if there was a consensus about what the resolution should be
(though don't tell my dissertation supervisor I said that).

Thanks for all your work anyway, I had forgotten quite how stunned I was
with the speed of XFCE when I first made the switch.

James