Re: Summary of (Was: GNOME desktop integration lib)

[Dan Winship <danw novell com>]

Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> * Call it libgtkdesktop and include in GTK source? Or in GTK proper?
> This makes sense for some of the stuff, like:
> 	* screensaver (see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305688).
> This could be merged with Dan's work on Gtk/GdkSession, and we could add
> there all kinds of hooks for the session-oriented operations
> (online/offline, screensaver, change background, etc, etc).

The "GtkSession" I'm currently working on is just a session-management
client (I changed from "GnomeClient" to "GtkSession", because "client"
doesn't suggest "session management client" unless you know in advance
that that's what it is). I figured that when I got around to proposing
it, we could figure out if that's really the best name, and if it makes
sense to merge it into a single class with the other desktoppy/sessiony
things that have been proposed.

It might make sense to have separate GtkSessionManagementClient,
GtkScreensaverManager, GtkNetworkStateNotifier, etc *interfaces*, and
have them all be implemented by some GtkSession/GtkDesktop class, which
would have a singleton instance. And then we can easily extend it in the
future by just adding new interfaces to that class, without having to
worry about that changing the size of the class struct because of new
signals and stuff.

> * gnome-desktop and gnome-menus. Even though this was my initial
> proposal, little has been said about them, so, what do we do? Do we
> merge them into glib/gtk, or do we merge them in that 'GNOME desktop
> integration lib'? Whatever we decide, we need to merge them, they serve
> very similar purposes and make no sense as separated libraries. Can
> these go to GTK?

I'm not sure there was consensus that it made no sense to have them
separate. gnome-desktop is more generically useful than gnome-menus.

I'd like GnomeDesktop to be at-or-below gtk, so GtkSession can use it,
because I want apps to register with the session management code by
passing the path to their .desktop file, which GtkSession would use to
figure out the app's RestartCommand. (GnomeClient uses the program's
argv to set the RestartCommand, but that doesn't work in the case where
the program is normally launched via a wrapper script that sets
environment variables (eg LD_LIBRARY_PATH, MONO_PATH, etc) and then
launches the real binary.)

-- Dan