[Fwd: Re: panel issues]

[Danny Milosavljevic]

Hi,

On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 14:49:45 -0800, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
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> Auke Kok wrote:
>> Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
>>>
>>> Auke Kok wrote:
>>>> this begs for having the thunar trash service automatically start in the 
>>>> 'autostarted applications' just like the tips display. Any reason why we're 
>>>> still mucking with .xinitrc's and the obvious horrors of the startxfce4 scripts? 

Only very important things are in there anyway.

>>>> It seems like xfce4-session should replace all of these methods.

If X11 session management would work properly and not "disappear"/crash applications randomly, sure, why not (ok, I didn't enable session management for a year or so, maybe it would be better now) - I recall evolution crashing the logout every single time and version.

>>> [The problem is that, if one of these applications dies]
[...]
> This is a very good point, but do we have to provide a GUI for
> everything?  I would consider *not* using the default components to be a
> very advanced-user thing to do.  Not that I'm against having a GUI for
> it, but I feel like there are other things that are more important that
> would be better to spend time on first.  (Watch, now that I've said
> that, Benny will have written an entire framework for this by tomorrow
> afternoon.)

Well, the obvious way would have the session manager pop up an "are you sure" kind of dialog when saving the session, listing all the apps that will be saved and the ones that vanished since the last save:

+-------------------------------------------
|  Ok, so you changed your desktop session.
|
|  xfce4-panel    Vanished   [ Start ] [ Pin Down ]
|  gnome-panel    Appeared   [ Terminate ]
|
|  For a grand total of these applications:
|
|  xscreensaver
|  evolution
|  firefox
|  gnome-panel
|
|   [ Cancel ] [ Save ]
+-------------------------------------------

Ok so it's sick, so what? ;)

Of course that would be a little bit overkill and probably would get annoying really quickly.

> Though I believe I had a xinitrc patch to load all the ~/.config/autostart items from bash; I'm not sure if I ever committed that.

Oh, sounds nice.

[...]
>> the session manager should obviously save/restore other programs, but really 
>> (personally) I hate that, and wish that every program I have just show up in 
>> 'autostarted applications' instead. I don't want to depend on the luck my system 
>> has in restoring the previous state, and it doesn't even remember everything anyway.
> 
> Yeah, I really hate X11 session management (Benny probably hates it
> more, though).  

Heh. Same here.

Especially having seen OS/2 session management (which is _great_), X11 session management hurts my head and I want to slap it for being so broken.

Anyway, I thought that nowadays Hibernate (the suspend-to-disk thing) is used and so nobody cared about X11 session management anymore? Otherwise the state of the art would be ridiculous.

> The entire usage model just seems fundamentally broken to me. 

Well, if it distinguished between crash and normal termination (just check the exit code with wait() and note which signal it was), it wouldn't be any problem. But nooo.

[...]
> Well, this kinda ties in with your desire that the session manager
> should be aware that some apps are 'special'.  

Yeah...

> Then again, maybe all this can be done as some sort of extension to the
> autostart spec.  I dunno.

eek.

cheers,
  Danny