Re: Regarding the session manager

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 04:18:08PM +0200, Fredrik Jonsson wrote:  
> 1. In what manner "should" gnome-settings-daemon be started?  
> It is not started explicitely by gnome-session or msm. If
> there is any general/more information regarding what
> services the desktop needs I'd be happy for that too.

I would say gnome-settings-daemon should be handled much like other
essential processes (window manager, panel).  They should have an SM
property indicating their type, and the SM should force one panel, one
file manager, one window manager, one settings daemon, etc. to be
running at all times; it should also be sure it starts things up in
the right order (settings daemon, then WM, then file manager, then
panel, I would say). If the user doesn't have one of these categories
in their session, the SM should put the default one back into the
session. There can be an override preference of some kind (an
allow_no_window_manager=true setting or something) for people who
really know what they are doing.

> 2. Is other work made on session management, or rather,
> should I continue to do this as a teach-myself-gnome thingy,
> or should I put some effort into actually making it
> generally useful? I'm quitting my work in order to focus on
> university and finishing my master during the next 12-18
> months, so I'll have some time to spend, and as previously
> mentioned it won't require much maintenance work once the
> basic functionality is finished, so it is feasible. There is
> quite a lot of stuff regarding gnome development that I need
> to learn though, so we are talking some months, towards the
> end of this year or something like that before I'd have
> something reaonably finished.

See this mail if you haven't:
  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-April/msg00090.html

I think the TODO file for msm is pretty accurate, if you fixed the
stuff in there for msm you should have a usable SM.

Feel free to create a CVS module for your work (or if you want to base
on msm, I'd like to see the first few patches but I'd probably want
you to take over ownership of the msm module once it looks like you
have a good start). Creating a cvs branch for gnome-session or msm 
would be sane too, be sure to tag the trunk at the point where you 
branch.

Havoc