Re: GNOME Summary, June 7-14

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On Thu, 17 Jun 1999 Tony.Lill@ajlc.waterloo.on.ca wrote:
> 
> Here's a question, how does one go about changeing the SM interface?
> The problem that lead me into looking at the session manager is that
> the session manager has no idea what host the client is running on.
>

I guess you'd have to try to convince the X people to change it. It would
be better to find a solution that doesn't involve changing it, or maybe
add a KDE/Gnome extension (we've already added "priorities" so apps can be
started in a certain order). If someone was serious about making SM work
well they'd probably maintain a joint KDE/Gnome SM spec in addition to the
gnome-session implementation, to describe any changes.
 
> IMHO, there should be an SM property that tells you the client
> host. It would take about 6 lines of code to add it to libXt.a.
> Now there is a function call, SMClientHost, that the spec claims will
> give you the info. However, as implemented, it just gives you the
> thing at the other end of the SM connection, which is always the X
> server. The only way I can think of getting the client host is from
> the window manager.
> 
> Then there's the UserId property. The spec also says "On POSIX-based
> systems this will contain the the user's name (the pw_name field of
> struct passwd)." In reality,  on a local linux box it works, but on a
> remote one, you get the uid number, making it useless for doing
> something like "rsh -l username host cmd".
>

Perhaps the SM spec people expected clients to track this info, and maybe
register an rsh or ssh restart command if necessary? This is just a guess.
 
> Even more unfortunately, the window manager is the only thing that
> could possibly do it properly. Think, for instance, if you login on a
> display with a different geometry, or enlightenment, where, near as I
> can tell, there is no way to start a client on any desktop but the
> root one.
> 

The other problem is that even if WMs were doing things right, few apps
set the class, name, and role hints properly to allow them to work.

Havoc