reopening the session management discussion...

[Erik Harrison]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 2:23 PM, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> jannis at xfce.org wrote:
>
>> I like both of these arguments. We could address the users needs to
>> edit the autostart list by improving xfce4-autostart-editor which I feel
>> is a bit too simple in its current state anyway. If we choose to do
>> it this way, I'd vote to make it a 4.8 or at least a 4.6 beta 1 issue.
>> IMHO its not worth delaying Pinkie even further.
>
> Oh no, I certainly wouldn't suggest delaying the alpha any longer.
> Improving the autostart editor would be great, but isn't necessary for
> my nefarious plan.
>
>>> * Can't control startup order.  Only issue here is xfdesktop starting
>>> before 'Thunar --daemon' on a system where dbus isn't set up properly.
>>> All other apps can be started whenever, save xfsettingsd (which
>>> xfce4-session explicitly starts).
>>
>> Depends on how the autostart system is implemented. We could add a
>> simple dependency mechanism (like an optional setting for each autostart
>> app for defining one other program it depends on) but of course this
>> would slow down the startup process and make patches like the one from
>> Auke less of an improvement.
>
> Well, the autostart spec doesn't have provisions for dependencies,
> right?  So anything we'd do along those lines would be an extension to
> the spec.  I'm still not really convinced we *need* start order control;
> as I said, the only app that really needs to be started first is
> xfsettingsd, and xfce4-session does that for us.  We'd lose our
> workaround to force-load the thunar daemon (for the trash service), but
> really, I hate that workaround, and people should just stop having
> broken dbus configs and it wouldn't be a problem.

Well, why not a "Xfce" .desktop file, that loads a script that
controls the order, just like in the old, reliable xinitrc days? That
way there is no concern about filling a directory with .desktop files
either that someone might foolishly delete.

>
>> Even to me the session management has always been a bit opaque. I think
>> it's way more transparent and clear to the user if he's able to modify
>> the started applications on his own. I guess I'm all for it.
>
> Yeah, I guess my issues with SM in part stem from how confusing it is,
> and how it makes use of archaic, often-broken protocols like ICE (well,
> arguably it's the libICE implementation that's broken, not the protocol,
> but... yeah).  In contrast, the xdg autostart mechanism is simple and
> pretty clear, and your average semi-techie can figure out how to edit
> the raw files if needed.  Figuring out what's wrong with a SM
> installation is a lot harder.
>
>        -brian
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-- 
Erik
"It's true, Alice Cooper is a hippie, but he's the bad kind of hippie.
He's the kind of hippie that breaks into people's offices, beats them
up, and shoots them in the head. Why? To steal their antique chairs."