Re: wmmail and session management

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

>There is such an identifier for distinguishing multiple windows.  It is
>the WM_ROLE property.  Generally a window manager can differentiate
>between windows by the (class, name, role) combination.  Currently not
>many (any?) gnome apps set this property, but the mechanism does exist.

 If session management is going to work, this sort of thing needs to be added
to the gnome-hello programs and to the guidelines on the Gnome website, to 
help application writers to develop usefully session-aware programs. By 
"usefully session aware" I mean that session management should be ubiquitous, 
transparent to the user, and reliable. I think this is an important issue in 
terms of consistent behaviour between Gnome components.

 The gnome-hello tutorial already has a section on session management, but it
might be useful to list the type of information which should be saved in the
session as well as showing how the gnome-session interface is handled.

 There is also a place for X resources in Gnome applications. The X resource
database is the logical place to store long-term user preferences (as opposed
to session information). Let's not have 100 Gnome applications with 100
different configuration files in 100 different formats when a central 
repository for this type of information already exists. Could libgnome provide
a wrapper for resource database calls to make it easier for Gnome developers
to use X resources?


 - Michael Rogers