Re: GUnique [Was: gnome-utils branched for GNOME 2.16]

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On 9/24/06, Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> wrote:
> Though I guess either way, you have essentially zero chance of getting
> this right without using libstartup-notification ... which might be the
> bigger picture point.

Actually as long as you aren't forking/execing a new process,
libstartup-notification isn't really needed anymore -- or soon won't
be (see e.g. bug 347375).  The EWMH, gtk+, and metacity have been
extended a bit so that libstartup-notification is only really needed
for launching processes (and special apps like metacity and
wnck-applet) these days.  Of course, if you have a single instance app
or open windows in response to messages from other applications then
you still have work to do, it's just been reduced...

> Also important to libdbus human-readability is the bus name the app
> owns, so it'd be nice to have org.gnome.GEdit rather than
> org.gnome.GUniqueApp.gedit
>
> There's a kind of impedance mismatch between dbus and some more basic
> ipc... with dbus you can have the bus launch things. So if you have a
> .service file, you can just unconditionally do:
>
>   app = new Proxy("org.gnome.GEdit");
>   app.Launch(uris, props);
>
> And gedit will be started if it isn't already, and reused otherwise,
> with no race conditions.

Uh, with no race conditions affecting the number of gedit processes, I
think you mean.  There's focus and workspace race conditions, unless
D-Bus launches gedit appropriately (e.g. uses
libstartup-notification).  Is it possible to have D-Bus launch using
libstartup-notification?


Elijah