Re: Session manager questions

[Gisli Ottarsson <gisli master adams com>]

As has been stated here, the idea behind the session management seems
to be that whatever the user had running at the end of a session will
be restarted during a follow-up session.  This includes the window
manager.

If correct, this seems somewhat fragile.  For instance, if you log out
or are logged out because your window manager died, will you the not
be missing a window manager the next time you log in?  Also, it makes
the process of changing window managers ambiguous.  Is killing your
window manager and starting a new one before logging out the right way
to do it?

Where do "Gnome Session Properties" come into this?  The System
section in the System Menus provides access for this dialog box
(should it be accessible from the Control Center instead?)   It 
would seem that this dialog box could allow the user to configure
two lists of applications:

  Applications that should *always* be started (e.g. window manager)

  Applications which should *never* be restarted when restoring a
  session, presumably because the don't know what to do.  Right now,
  for instance if you started emacs in a session by giving it a
  relative path, emacs is unlikely to find this file on restart.

Any application that is not on one of these lists would be restarted
based on the previous session.  Note that a fickle user playing the 
window manager field would be returned to his chosen window manager
(the "always start" choice) and a window manager "fling" would not
start because it would detect that another window manager has been
started.

Gisli