Re: Gnome Session Services Framework

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-07-11 at 14:38 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 7/11/05, John (J5) Palmieri <johnp redhat com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-07-11 at 14:14 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> > > Hey, guys- if I wanted to test this:
> > > (1) what would I need to do to set it up, exactly? (presume that I
> > > have all of GNOME running from source, and can patch as needed.)
> > 
> > You just need to patch gnome-session with Rodrigo's latest patch
> > (turning it on with whatever the compile switch is - Rodrigo?) and
> > compile libgnomeservice from CVS.
> 
> Would I then need to add anything magic desktop files? remove anything
> from the extant session?
>  
> > > (2) how could I tell if it succeeded/failed? What are the
> > > expectations, design goals, etc.? What new things should I be able to
> > > do as a user (or admin) that I couldn't do before? What things do you
> > > expect won't work?
> > 
> > For right now, I would keep checking that we don't hose the session with
> > the patch turned on (i.e. everything works as normal). 
> 
> OK. So major design goal at the moment is 'don't break anything, and
> potentially enable new functionality later'?

Don't break anything is the first goal.  If session doesn't work GNOME
is screwed ;-)  

> > Rodrigo, can you
> > supply Luis with a service that uses the wrapper?  You would need that
> > to check if the service starting code is working properly.
> 
> Ah, so this is the new functionality?

The new functionality we want to see for Gnome 2.12 is being able to
drop a service file in the right directory and have the service start on
login.  

> > Future looking we are going to replace the current hard coded services
> > (like gnome-settings-daemon) as libgnomeservice's and have them start up
> > using the dependency code.  At that point as we patch services you will
> > be able to check if the services do indeed start in the right order and
> > even profile to see if there is something we can be doing to get things
> > started faster.
> 
> But none of that is ready yet, right? Just verifying.

It is not ready no but the code is there.  We need to patch some of the
gnome services and test to make sure it is robust enough to become a
replacement for what we already do. 

The reasoning is that the goal of dropping in a service file to get a
service started up on login should integrate into our future goal of
replacing how we start the whole session up on login.  This leads to a
bit more code and caution than if all we wanted to do was what we are
proposing for G2.12 which in turn makes goal #1 (not breaking session)
the most important of them all ;-)

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp redhat com>