Re: Multi-sessioning for GNOME [revisited]

[jacob helixcode com (Jacob "Ulysses" Berkman)]

Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:

> Moving .gnome around is not a solution. 
> 
>  - all settings should not be per-session. Some should be per-host, 
>    some per-display, etc. If we want to be remotely user friendly
>    GNOME should automatically decide which are which.

How is GNOME going to decide this?  Seems a hard problem to determine
the intent of a config variable...

>  - users do not want to know about .gnome or environment variables;
>    these are command line details, not in end user awareness

That is why you have a little session chooser app at startup which
sets the environment variables for you.

>  - .gnome is deprecated anyway

Umm, AFAIK GNOME 1.4 will be using it...  is this not the case?

> Making this usable will involve GConf and gnome-session work, along
> with fixing applications when required, and probably would be enhanced
> by multiple display support in GTK.

Making it pefect may, but usable requires none of this.

> I think we should fix it properly, because these semi-fixes just make
> it harder to support upgrades. For example, if you upgrade RH 6.2 to
> 7.0 it will go in .gnome and modify things so the upgrade goes smoothly.
> If you are using these weird hacks it will just fall over. GConf gives
> us an appropriate abstraction layer to avoid this type of problem in
> the future. The upgrade path to 2.0 will be hard enough without adding
> an infinite number of .gnome directories.

Well we can't fix it properly until GNOME 2.  And some people would
like to be able to use it before then.

> I think gnome-session already more or less supports multiple sessions,
> they are just disabled because of the .gnome problem.

I think it's much more less than more.

I guess I am just much more interested in having someting I can use
rather than nothing, even without opaque ref counts.

Jacob
-- 
"Tangerine, tangerine."  -- Robert Plant