Re: The future of session management in GNOME

[Tom Tromey <tromey redhat com>]

>>>>> "Havoc" == Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:

Havoc> Same for gedit - I think I'd like gedit to just remember window
Havoc> state for all documents, per-document. I can't imagine ever
Havoc> "setting up gedit" and then saving my desktop globally though,
Havoc> as XSMP supports.

Waaay back when I worked on this stuff, I was heavily influenced by
About Face and I was aiming for a UI where "logging out" was more like
temporarily suspending a session; the idea being that Gnome would
remember the state of things, and when you logged back in it would be
as though you hadn't left.  So you wouldn't set up gedit per se,
instead you'd just be working, then you would log out, then later you
would log back in and resume working.

XSMP was a uniquely unfriendly way to approach this though -- it is
much too complicated and makes apps jump through ridiculous hoops.
Also as I recall some decisions were made on the basis of things that
no longer seem so important... window manager independence, nice SM
support for non-Gnome X apps, multiple modes for users who didn't want
it to work this way, stuff like that.

I still like this model (logging in is still a weak spot in Gnome
IMNSHO... but luckily I don't do it much), but I'm skeptical whether
it is the best one.  For one thing, coupling this with saving
state-per-document and with multiple sessions will yield an incoherent
experience.

Tom