Saving App State

[Michael Terry <mike mterry name>]

I wanted to start a discussion about how GNOME and friends use saved state.

Currently, applications tend to stuff bits of saved state (like window
position, which tabs are open, etc.) in gsettings, because it is
convenient.  But that puts the state in ~/.config instead of ~/.cache
and I believe is discouraged for other reasons(?).

Regardless, gsettings is a nice API for storing the same kind of data
that state-saving would use.  Is a similar API for state on any
roadmaps?

If we were able to funnel all state-saving through the same API and
into the same store, we could potentially do some neat things with it
like syncing the state between devices.  And along with a single API,
we could provide some guidelines (like maybe instead of having every
app save its x,y position, just let the shell save that state).

This isn't necessarily a call for full session saving again.  But at
least letting what applications are already doing, do it in a
recommended way.  (Though regarding session saving, apparently Mac OS
Lion recently added "Resume" which is basically desktop-wide saved
state.)

-mt