Re: Multi-sessioning for GNOME [revisited]

[Colm Smyth <Colm Smyth ireland sun com>]

>From: Alan Cox <alan redhat com>
>Subject: Re: Multi-sessioning for GNOME [revisited]
>To: Colm Smyth ireland sun com
>Cc: alan redhat com, Stephen Browne ireland sun com, gnome-hackers gnome org
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>> - you can have multiple concurrent sessions by making session
>>   a symlink to the desired session file and by having
>
>How. My /home is shared

Do you mean that you share your home directory with other users?
If you simply mean available as an NFS-mounted partition,
I don't see your issue.

>> As I believe Havoc hinted at before, GConf is a better way
>> for storing and accessing configuration information
>> for GNOME; I would really prefer to see a way to
>
>GConf makes no difference here. You need a way to honour a variable that is
>policy only to the session management/control app and you need a way to 
indicate
>whether an item is shared. You need it for both API's

Yes.

>The GNOME_WORLD stuff btw is about 20 lines of code, and works. Im not doing it
>sharing stuff since Ive yet to be bothered enough to hack the apps to indicate
>this. I'm running Gnome 1.2 with a GNOME_WORLD and no problems.  Have been
>for months

Maybe I'm picking this up wrong, but it seems to me that you
are strongly advocating the GNOME_WORLD approach (which
I think everyone understands quite well) and not really
giving consideration to the alternative solutions that
different people are suggesting.

I believe a number of folks are saying that they recognise
the need for multiple session support without having
their entire configuration duplicated across each
session. This is an unfortunate side-effect of 
GNOME_WORLD.

If we are going to invest any effort in applications to
make configuration variables optionally session-dependent,
then I recommend instead that we migrate to GConf - by
partitioning the GConf database and constructing the
configuration path dynamically, we can get exactly the
combination of session-dependent and session-independent
configuration that we want. We also have an open-ended
solution that makes the configuration dependent on
any desired future variable, not just the current display.

Colm.

>Alan
>
>
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--
Colm Smyth - Sun Microsystems, Ireland - Desktop S/W Engineering
Sun Xtn: 19166    Phone: 353-1-819-9166   Fax: 353-1-819-9200