Re: The future of session management in GNOME

[Dan Winship <danw novell com>]

Dan Winship wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
>> I don't think you're crazy, but can I suggest a good approach might be:
>>  - start from what the user benefits / scenarios are
>>  - figure out in a top-down way what API we'd like _apps_ to have
>>  - then figure out how to implement that or something like it
> 
> Well, I would agree completely if we were starting from zero, but given
> that we aren't, there are a lot of advantages to sticking with XSMP even
> if it isn't the solution we would have come up with on our own.

And let me clarify that a big part of what I'm talking about here is
interoperability. Session management is a different situation from most
of the other things that have gone through freedesktop. There is already
a widely-deployed and interoperable protocol implementing it, and we
would be proposing to replace that protocol with a new one which is not
forward or backward compatible, and which would have fewer features. If
we wanted that to gain traction, we'd need a *really* compelling
argument, and I don't think we have that argument. So we can *either* be
interoperable with the rest of unixkind, *or* we can have the perfect
session management protocol, but not both.

-- Dan