Gnome Session Manager Problems

[Eric Kidd <eric kidd pobox com>]

Session management is badly broken on my RedHat 6.0 system. I don't know if
this is a local problem, or if it affects other users.

 * Trashing a session doesn't work reliably--certain non-Gnome applications
   will update their saved session even when I haven't checked "Save
   current setup".

   As far as I can tell, the Gnome session manager supports "session
   names". These are labels for alternate saved sessions. Apparently, if
   "Save current setup" is checked, gsm sets the session name to "Trash"
   and sends a SaveYourself message to all the clients.

   But since the X session management protocol doesn't seem to know about
   session names, non-Gnome SM clients save their settings anyway. Do I
   understand what's going on here, or am I missing something? When and if
   session names are fully implemented, what will non-Gnome applications
   do?

 * The session-properties application has trouble restarting from a saved
   session. It always shows up in the process list (and gets saved
   correctly at logout), but it doesn't always display a GUI. Is this some
   kind of race condition?
   
 * Emacs (as shipped with RH) doesn't appear to support session management.
   This is suprising, since even xclock and xeyes have rudimentary support.
   Additionally, Emacs core dumps with a SIGPIPE when X quits. Is this just
   a RedHat build problem, or do other people encounter this, too?

 * Most Gnome applications don't support session management in any useful
   fashion. They all restart, but most of them don't know how to save their
   internal state.

 * The few Gnome applications which *do* allegedly support session
   management have lots of warnings and clutter in their source code.
   My impression: Session management is still too hard for developers to
   implement, and users aren't requesting it. If this is case, it probably
   means that most users aren't using session management.

 * It's not clear that all the screwball cases work. What if I set my
   EDITOR variable to "spiffy-gnome-edit" and run mutt in an xterm? Mutt
   will spawn an X application that shows up in session-properties, right?
   But since mutt can't run as a child session manager, I'll get in trouble
   when I restart.

 * Many Gnome-compliant window mangers don't restore window positions
   reliably when loading a session. I've been helping to identify and close
   these bugs in Sawmill, but there still seemed to be a few niggling
   problems in Enlightenment the last time I checked (mostly related to
   virtual areas).

Is there a development plan for GSM? How does Gnome session management
relate to X session management?

Anyway, thank to everybody who actually who actually read this whole post. :-)
  
Cheers,
Eric