Session management stuff

[Carsten Schaar <nhadcasc fs-maphy uni-hannover de>]

Moin moin,


some of you may have noticed, that the session management stuff has
changed slightly some weeks ago.  The main changes are:

* Every gnome application now tries to connect to a session manager
  automatically.  So every gnome application should at least be
  restarted from the session manager.

* The gnome command line options are saved automatically. This means,
  that an application, called with a '--display' command line option,
  will be restarted with this option.

* Some environment variables are saved automatically (unfortunately
  right now gnome-session doesn't store them.  If this will be done,
  the session management stuff will support multihead environments
  without any problems.)

* The GnomeClient object got an easy interface to the gnome_config
  stuff.  This makes the saving and restoring of the programs state
  easier.

* The 'gnome_client_new_default' function was replaced by the
  'gnome_master_client' function.  'gnome_master_client' should be
  called in the command line parsing functions or after 'gnome_init'.
  It was really a little bit annoying to call a gnome function before
  calling 'gnome_init'.

* Support for the cloning of programs.

* The definition of the 'gnome_client_set_environment' function has
  changed.  You can now set single environment entries, and don't need
  to set the hole environment at once.


Currently I'm writing some documentation about the session management
implementation.  It will go into the Gnome Developers' Information in
'gnome-libs/devel-docs'.  Until this documentation is finished, you
may have a look at 'gnome-hello-4-SM' in 'gnome-libs/gnome-hello'.

Tschuess, Carsten


PS: I'll probably add some support to discard a saved session more
easily, but there (hopefully) won't be any serious changes to the
existing session management functions anymore.
 
-- 
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Carsten Schaar                         email: nhadcasc@fs-maphy.uni-hannover.de