Re: Multi-sessioning for GNOME [revisited]

[Glynn Foster <glynn foster Sun COM>]

Heya,
One mail = Some replies....

Alan Cox wrote:
> 
> > - you can have multiple concurrent sessions by making session
> >   a symlink to the desired session file and by having
> 
> How. My /home is shared

I don't understand what you mean and perhaps there is something that
I haven't thought about. Can you explain the reason apart from the
obvious 'my /home shared'. I just really can't see where the problem is.

> 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

Hmmm...I don't really like the GNOME_WORLD environmental variable personally, it 
seems that by creating .gnome-($hostname)--$(xres)-$(yres) there is going to 
be a huge amount of duplicate information....and that's just plain ugly.
There is always going to be a question of what stuff to share and how to 
share it.

Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
>For GConf, the basic idea we had, which I guess is in the thread Glynn
>mentioned, is that we have a way for apps to install a hint "this
>setting is per-display" or "this setting is per-session" or
>whatever. Then, GConf would have a per-session storage backend that
>gets the per-session settings. That's nice and simple, and works
>properly.

Yes...I all for this certainly...Is there any huge (you can't touch that) 
reason why this can't be implemented for GNOME1.4. If we can get this 
sort of stuff into GConf the sooner the better. Sure it might be a case 
of only getting pretty much skeletal code, but at least it would be a
start..

Alan Cox wrote:
>
>You add markup to the variable to indicate if its global or session oriented.
>Thats also about 20 lines of code to fix for gnome 1.4, then tweak the apps
>as needed

Yes...it's the 'tweak the apps' bit that I don't like....especially when it is
likely that we'll have to 're-tweak the apps' a few weeks/months down the line.

Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
>Yes, but I think it's stupid to make future upgrades to the right way
>much more painful, when GNOME 2.0 is in the pretty near future. We
>shouldn't introduce some feature that we're going to break and change
>with confusing results only a few months later.

Well as you said yourself, 'I think gnome-session already more or less supports 
multiple sessions'......I'm all for getting this stuff in GConf as early as 
we can, if that is possible.....but I *do* think that the code change for the 
idea that I suggested would be relatively small and certainly would have little
impact on anything *but* gnome-session, and hence make a future transition to 
GConf quite easy.

Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
>I will get bugs in the Red Hat bug tracker about
>how the session stuff doesn't make any sense, and I'll be embarassed
>to close them with "supposed to work that way."

Hmmm...I can say that about a *lot* of apps and features....That should
have nothing to do with the argument.

>Well, they can apply a patch to their copy. But I don't think we
>should introduce this kind of thing in 1.4 only to break it again in
>2.0, especially since it won't even work properly in 1.4. Even if we
>do, we should still encourage the Sun team to fix it for 2.0.

I can see what you are saying alright...but applying a patch isn't the 
right thing...I can see two options -
	1) Getting this into GConf now [even if it's only skeletal, it
	   will still provide a base to start from]
	2) Coming up with a temporary solution until we work out a solution for 
	   GConf and GNOME2.0

>Look, there are these guys at Sun who have session management working
>in CDE. We should encourage them to get it working really well in
>GNOME: make sure the window manager saves app positions, make sure
>apps actually save things such as open documents and cursor positions,
>and so on. It's not a huge job to get this right, they are willing to
>do it, let's encourage them to do it right.

Yes, we want to see multi-session support for GNOME...not only because
the CDE customers will complain if it's not there ;), but also because
it will benefit the community and GNOME users worldwide....
gnome-session, as I see it, is quite flaky at the moment....stuff 
not getting restored on login (but might be because apps are not 
providing the correcting information when the session-save call 
is made)......

Now either way we go with above, I think that multi-session support 
should be included for GNOME1.4 because lots of users would find it a useful 
feature and we would be able to review the existing session code, especially
if we start moving over to GConf right away...

		Anyway, all opinions gratefully received,
			Glynn ;)
-- 
Glynn Foster				Email: glynn foster ireland sun com
CDE Group				Tel:   +353 - 1 - 8199782
Sun Microsystems Ireland Ltd.           Generation dot-COM        i||c Gman