Session client support in libxfce4ui

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Olivier Fourdan wrote:
> 
> Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
>> I'd prefer no session management support at all in libxfce4ui.  libexo
>> has a simple x11r5-type implementation, which should be fine for most
>> apps that just want to set a restart command.
>>
>> Otherwise, I'm at least considering dropping session management support
>> from xfdesktop, and maybe any other apps I work on as well.  There are
>> just too many reports of people losing xfdesktop, or xfce4-panel, or
>> whatever, and then somehow these apps fall out of the session, and
>> there are just too many problems.
>>
> [...]
>> Barring that, I think I'd actually rather put xfdesktop etc. in
>> autostart rather than continuing to use session management.
> 
> I beg to disagree, proper session management is important and older
> sessions management ala X11R5 is just crap.
> 
> Removing features is not really a good way to fix them, IMHO.

X11 session management is IMHO crap, whether it's the old X11R5 protocol 
or the "new" X11R6 protocol.

> As for apps being dropped from the session, this could be handled by the
> session manager (making sure that a given set of apps are always
> restored, this is what gnome session does I think).

I'm not a huge fan of hard-coding things like that :-( .

> Anyway, if an apps is not saved along with the session, it could be very
> well because the application has quit (or crashed?) and unregistered
> from the session manager before the session get saved?

Well, xfce4-session doesn't support the session management flag that 
tells the session manager to respawn an app when it dies, which could 
"fix" this.  Of course, the underlying fix is to make xfdesktop never 
crash.  I'd love to be able to do that with xfdesktop, but I don't think 
that's feasible in the near term.  I just don't have the time (or, 
sadly, the motivation) to do that.

Personally I think the core desktop apps are very poorly-suited to using 
session management.  The idea of session management is to help apps 
restore their previous state.  This is great for things like text 
editors, where you might want to quit your session but come back to it 
later, restoring all the documents you had open before.  But I feel like 
an app that doesn't have persistent non-configuration state (like all of 
the Xfce core components, aside from maybe Thunar) should be using a 
simpler mechanism to get itself started automatically, and it would also 
be nice to have auto-respawn functionality if a particular app quits 
uncleanly.

	-brian