Removing "Save session" from logout menu

[Nick Schermer]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 5:49 PM, Pasi Lallinaho <open at knome.fi> wrote:
> Hello all Xfce developers and enthusiastics!
>
> I'm sending this mail referring to the bug I just filed [1] and the
> conversation with Jerome some days ago at #xfce-dev. The bug description
> pretty much describes what I'd like and why. I also heard/remember this
> has been discussed earlier.
>
> What do you think of dropping the option?
>
> The reason why I originally started asking about this (again) is that we
> continuously have people with no panels. The most probable reason is
> that their panel has crashed for a reason or another (more on this in
> the next <p>), the panic and log out and the panel remains closed, and
> when they log back in, it's not even trying to start since they've saved
> the session with no panel.
>
> I also have an idea how to investigate what are the reasons why the
> panel crashes in the first place. (Especially Nick, tell me if it's
> sensible to do this;) In Xubuntu Lucid+1 pre-Alpha/Alpha/Beta releases
> we could "attach xfce4-panel to gdb" (I have no idea what this actually
> means, I was told you can debug panel this way) and try to gather
> information. We could instruct our testers to especially try to crash
> the panel and act when the panel (maybe) crashes. Xubuntu, and I think
> Xfce as well, would definitely benefit from this kind of testing, if the
> data would solve at least some of the panel crashing cases.

Well attaching gdb to the panel is terrible for performance (your are
hit 2 times: first because you have to compile with debugging to get
decent backtraces and even more because gdb slows down the app because
of all the logging).

The old panel was kinda hard to debug (well, had no decent internal
checking) and never restarted plugins, this will change for 4.8 which
is written in a more gobject style (with a ton of type checking and
debugging, which is only active when compiled with debugging) and
crashing plugins are automatically restarted (when last restart was
more then 60 seconds ago) without intervention of the user. If the
panel crashes, xfce4-session should bring it back again. So unexpected
panel exits should occur a lot less in 4.8 (yes, I can still use some
more test users!).

About the save-session option: I'm not really bothered by it, but what
we could do is make a configure option (in dialog or hidden setting).
Distros can set this option to false through by using a 'default'
xfconf template (installed in /etc/xdg/...).

Nick