Re: Multi-sessioning for GNOME [revisited]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Glynn Foster <glynn foster Sun COM> writes: 
> 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..

The reason is simply that it's a largish change that could introduce
bugs and API instability, so I don't want to jeopardize the release schedule.

GConf 1.0 in GNOME 1.4 does support a cheesy GNOME_WORLD type of
feature, in your ~/.gconf.path you can specify a different storage
database based on environment variables. So this does what Alan
wants. But there is no UI for it and it's a "hidden" feature.
 
> 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.

Whoa, lost track of your original proposal in all the confusion. ;-)

As I understand that proposal you are just talking about saving the
contents of the session, not saving any other configuration info, and
then adding UI for multiple sessions. I think that's a no-brainer,
sure we should have that. I don't know about the 1.4 vs. 2.0 issue -
Maciej and the rest of the release team will have to say. 

I think you'll find that lots of apps don't support sessions properly;
for example, either they try to save their geometry themselves, or
they don't provide enough information to the WM for the WM to save it.
Also, almost zero apps save useful state such as open documents and
cursor position. So fixing the most important apps is a big issue
here.
 
> 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...
> 

OK, I think multiple-session support is sort of a separate issue from
the whole multiple-configuration issue we started talking about. Sorry
about that.

Both gnome-session and the apps need some work. gnome-session needs to
be hacked on very, very slowly and carefully; if it crashes, the whole
session dies, and it's pretty bad. But enhancing it would be good, and
cleaning up some of the design flaws (Owen can tell you about these to
some extent, Jacob probably has a few in mind too). 

Probably we need changes to the window manager to make it work 100%
properly, I think you'll find that John is super-helpful and will
rapidly fix any sawfish problem you alert him to.

Then a control panel as you say, tweaking apps as required, etc... 

Havoc