session manager help

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Some people are valiantly nursing gnome-session along, but we need
some broader-scope session management love.

Some of the problems:

 - an absolutely essential feature we don't have is checking that the
   user has a panel, desktop manager, and window manager, and making
   sure they click all kinds of safety dialogs before we let them be
   disabled permanently. A persistent issue seen on user mailing lists 
   is "I lost my panel!" or worse, "I lost my window manager!"

 - gnome-session is simply flaky, and not robust against broken apps.
   An example is
   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=79829 

   Another example is that it times out and kills apps if they take
   too long to start up (currently that timeout is long, but then the
   long timeout slows down login). I don't think we've had a Red Hat
   release in recent memory without mysterious gnome-session bugs.

 - the startup programs / session management control panel sucks
   mightily. "startup programs" is legitimate functionality but this
   UI for it is awful. A nicer UI for it might even let you change
   your window manager, desktop manager, etc.

 - the protocol between the control panel and the session manager is
   plain old crackrock.

 - gnome-session doesn't provide adequate feedback about what's going 
   on in various cases, e.g. if taking forever to log out it 
   doesn't indicate which app it's waiting for.

 - gnome-session needs to be updated for standards compliance, e.g.  I
   don't think the SaveYourself message is interpreted in the way that
   Matthias Ettrich and I agreed to interpret it.

 - we need to be extending the SM properties to support things like a
   human-readable application name and nice icon set as application
   properties. This should be done correctly. ;-)

 - one of the properties to add is "I am the window manager" or "I am
   the panel" so that we can generically check that you have a WM, 
   instead of doing "if (strcmp (metacity))" type of stuff.

 - the login and logout effects could be more cool, and even
   themeable. ;-) (OK, it's bloat, but it's the only fun feature in
   here... ;-)

 - gnome-session is basically a nightmare to debug. e.g. xmms 
   was broken and causing hangs on logout; using msm's logging
   feature, I figured this out in 5 minutes, with gnome-session I
   would have been inserting printfs for hours.

 - GnomeClient is kind of showing its age; we'd like to get an SM API
   in GTK, and maybe simplify the API some and add some nice features 
   in the process.

At one point I started the project "msm" in CVS to try to address some
of this; gnome-session has come to suck somewhat less since I started
msm, though the gnome-session code is still, well, not great.  msm has
a TODO file that is a pretty accurate (and fairly short) list of what
work remains to be done in order to try deploying it. msm also comes
with a client-side API called "GsmClient"

I could probably finish up msm bulletpoints given a couple weeks. But
what we really need is someone to babysit the session management
problem for the long term, and I am trying to avoid owning more
modules.

We don't need a lot of features here, or anything flashy; but it does
need to work somewhat better than it does today.  We'd need someone
who's willing to carefully read the XSMP spec and SM-related bits of
the ICCCM and document any clarifications/extensions they make to
those.

Don't think it matters if we base the work on gnome-session or msm or
if someone wants to start over, as long as it gets the job done.

Anyhow: if you feel like you're careful and conscientous enough to
work on a module that crashes the whole desktop when it crashes, and
that needs to be standards compliant, race-condition-safe,
asynchronous, handle all errors, do the right thing UI-wise, and
generally done capital-C Correctly, this is a problem that's begging
for you to step up and come to the aid of GNOME users everywhere. ;-)

If you aren't really the hard core Correctness type, there's a good
chance of making gnome-session worse - the session manager is easy to
get mostly working and hard to make robust enough to keep users from
breaking it or seeing bugs "in the wild" with lots of random crappy
apps doing broken things.

On the plus side, once the SM is working well I don't think it's *too*
much ongoing effort. Featuritis would not be a virtue here.

Any takers? I'd suggest starting by reading the specs and looking
through the gnome-session/msm code and either trying to fix some of
the gnome-session issues or work on some of the msm TODO.

Havoc