shortcut manager and session manager

[Benedikt Meurer]

Olivier Fourdan wrote:
>>>That's the expected behaviour. The xfce-mcs-manager itself should not 
>>>register with the session manager (well, the mcs manager should not be 
>>>used for anything except managing settings).
> 
> BTW, setting SESSION_MANAGER isn't enough to register an application 
> with the session manager, so it does not imply that the MCS manager 
> would connect to the session manager, that's fairly separate things 
> IMHO. There is no design icompatibility here.
> 
> Shortcuts are settings. The user expects to find the shortcuts editor in 
> the MCS manager, just like (s)he did with previous versions of xfce.
> 
> So that means that the shortcuts editor has to be kept in the MCS scope. 
> Making a separate application would mean writting a dummy app with no 
> window that would just be kept arround running to grab the keys and runs 
> the applications. And at startup, that application would have to read 
> the shortcut XML file just like the MCS manager does, That's what I 
> meant by waste of resources in my previous message.

The mcs manager is already a large waste of memory, so the overhead of a 
separate application should be relatively small (most probably 
unnoticable). My point is (as always): Get rid of the whole MCS stuff 
and replace it with something light and robust. I'm aware of the fact 
that this is unlikely to happen for Xfce 4.4, but I would strongly 
suggest to develop new stuff w/o the MCS libs/daemon, so we don't add 
further dependencies here.

One word on SESSION_MANAGER: Since mcs manager is a settings daemon, it 
should only manage settings, and at worst, launch external settings 
applications (for example, a kcontrol module, or a distro specific 
settings module), and these applications should never be restarted by 
the session manager, esp. since they usually need some special setup 
(e.g. started with sudo, but sudo is not included in the argv reported 
to the session manager).

I wanted to develop a launcher service for Thunar anyway, which would be 
run from xfce4-session on-demand (or using D-BUS activation). If you 
really want the stuff to be run as MCS module, then you could just pass 
the command to the launcher service and it will take care of launching 
the application within the session. But this will take some time until 
its ready, so in the meantime there's no session support for apps run 
from the MCS shortcuts editor.

> Cheers,
> Olivier.

Benedikt