Re: Feature suggestions for GNOME-compliant WMs

[James Ramsey <jjramsey_6x9eq42 yahoo com>]

--- Michael ROGERS <M.Rogers@cs.ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
> [...]
> 
> >I suggest that GNOME-compliant window managers have
> two features that
> >can be made available from the root menu:
> >
> >1) An "Exit" feature that would always simply
> terminate the window
> >manager, period.
> >
> >2) A "Logout" feature that would 
> >
> >a) call "save-session --kill" (or some functional
> equivalent) if GNOME
> >were running 
> >
> >b) exit the window manager if no desktop
> environment were detected to
> >be running
> 
> [...]

> 
> Sounds like a fair enough suggestion, but does it
> really need to be put in 
> the WM compliance spec? WM authors are aware of the
> problem of duplicating
> Gnome functions, but some of them choose to do it
> anyway.  :)

This would not be a matter of a window manager duplicating GNOME
functions but rather of having that functionality accessed from the
root menu as well as the GNOME menu. There's actually a good reason for
this. In a typical X setup, the "Exit" or "Logout" entry in the WM's
root menu generally has the effect of exiting X. This is, of course,
because the common practice is to have the window manager be the last
item in the xinitrc/Xclients file. As a result, a typical user reflex
would be to try to log out of X by clicking on the root menu's
Exit/Logout entry. In GNOME though, this reflex does not naturally
work. All exiting the window manager does is, um, exit the window
manager, and while GNOME is technically correct in doing this, it is at
least annoying, and a user who doesn't know what is going on will be
confused and may think that something has gone catastrophically wrong
because the windows have no borders--and probably blame GNOME. Of
course, there is the command "save-session --kill", and one can put
this in the root menu, but this is really a workaround for an
inelegance in how GNOME currently works with WMs. Also, it is less
useful if a window manager happens to have an "Exit" entry hard-coded
into the root menu, or worse, a root menu entry named "Logout" that
really only exits the WM but looks like it ought to actually log one
out.

This isn't duplicating functionality; it's getting GNOME to work better
with GNOME-compliant WMs.



===


----I am a fool for Christ. Mostly I am a fool.----

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