Re: Suggestions for better workspaces as independant tasks

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

On 8 February 2012 15:22, Julien Olivier <julo42 gmail com> wrote:
>> there is no programmatic way for an application to describe whether
>> it's going to open a new window, a new tab, or create a new process,
>> or what its default is.
>>
>
> If the application wants to have only one window, it should use
> something like LibUnique ( http://live.gnome.org/LibUnique ). AFAIK,

I know full well about LibUnique, considering that I'm the one who wrote it.

that is why I said "describe", and not "implement": a single instance
application cannot tell the shell that its policy should be changed,
because there is no way for the application to express this
information - unless the application has already started, and it's
using unique, or (better, given that unique has been deprecated)
GtkApplication, but in that case it's already too late. plus,
applications using unique or GtkApplication can still decide to do
weird stuff, like actually starting in multiple-instances mode.

on top of this lack of ways to express whether an application is a
single instance app or not, there's also the issue of people using
their own way to ensure being single instance. Firefox, Chrome,
LibreOffice, and countless others, do not use unique - nor
GtkApplication.

the shell cannot (and should not) contain whitelists or blacklists,
because down that way lies madness for both users and maintainers.

>> plus, gnome-terminal is, strictly speaking, a single instance
>> application. whenever you execute 'gnome-terminal', the currently
>> running process (if any) will be contacted, and a new window or tab
>> will be created. you actually have to use a specific command line
>> incantation to get it to create a new process.
>>
>
> That's not how it works on my PC: launching gnome-terminal twice
> consecutively opens two terminals.

it's still one process, which along with the desktop file associated
to it, are the only things that the shell can actually see.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/