Re: workspace vs session

[Chris Eveleigh <whyoh entrophilia com>]

On Fri, 2009-06-12 at 14:57 +0200, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:
> Le vendredi 12 juin 2009 à 13:20 +0100, Chris Eveleigh a écrit :
> > hello,
> > 
> > big thanks for all the work so far on gnome-shell - it's looking
> > awesome and it's great to be able to play with it using jhbuild
> > magic.  :-)
> > 
> > i love the idea of thinking about my computer use in terms of
> > 'activities' - i think that's definitely the way to go.  however, it
> > looks like gnome-shell re-uses 'workspaces' for activities .. which
> > seems wrong to me.  i think a more natural fit for 'activity' is
> > 'session'.
> The idea behind activities (which we now have renamed to "desktop
> contexts" to avoid confusion around this term) is to allow people to use
> different sessions (I would not call this that way, but that's part of
> the idea) on different workspaces. That means they can use them at the
> same time and switch easily. Now, these desktop contexts can be closed
> and restarted later - at least that's the plan. If you don't want to use
> workspaces, just run a single one - or several using the same desktop
> context.
> 
> 
> > the key real-world example i've noticed which backs up this thought is
> > that i need different views of the same folder in nautilus for two
> > different activities.  i just can't do that with workspaces.
> That could be a feature, and I don't see why workspaces would forbid
> that. Implementing this can be complex and won't be done immediately (if
> ever), but it's perfectly possible for Nautilus to know what workspaces
> it's on, and how it should behave. At least I'll try to make some apps
> follow that rule.
> 
> See http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/DesktopContexts for a few ideas
> about this.

ah!  thanks for the explanation and link - that makes me feel a lot
happier.  :-D

from that page, "...We can add that context should also restore
applications' states using GnomeSession..." - sounds like what i want.

> 
> > i can see that changing from workspaces to something else would be a
> > difficult thing at this stage but if the activity model is at the core
> > of the gnome-shell design then i reckon it's worth some pain now to
> > get the right fit.
> This design is not really at the core of the shell. Actually, workspaces
> are... ;-)
> 
> The problem with desktop contexts is that they're something quite
> complex to implement, and we're not sure that's the way to go for all
> users. Experimenting with it will hopefully allow us to see what we
> should do.
> 
> But I don't see why you don't want them to integrate with workspaces at
> all. That doesn't prevent you from doing anything, since you can always
> avoid using them.
> 
> 
> Cheers
> 

the next paragraph on that page (containing "desktop contexts are linked
to Metacity workspaces") seems a little confused about the relationship
between the two but it sounds like we'll be able to spread a context
across multiple workspaces - which sounds ideal to me.

:-)