Re: [Nautilus-list] run-nautilus

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Tuesday, August 21, 2001, at 12:33  PM, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com> writes:
> >     1) Is it OK to not see the "manage desktop" switch at all in 
> > preferences if Nautilus
> > is invoked this way and not already running?
>
> The question I have here is "how do you turn the desktop back on"?
> The natural thing is to run Nautilus from the menu, then go to prefs.
> If you aren't managing the desktop then you don't normally have
> Nautilus in your session, most likely. So to re-enable the desktop you
> have to go to preferences.

I agree that if you aren't managing the desktop, and then invoke Nautilus 
from the menu, you'd want to have a switch in Preferences to let you turn 
it on.

That was the intent of the oiginal design, but perhaps we were a bit too 
naive about how session management works. We had wanted it to work so that 
if you turned on "manage the desktop", Nautilus would take care of 
arranging to be running all the time, and if you turned it off, Nautilus 
would arrange things so that it wouldn't be running all the time. Thus you 
wouldn't have to do any direct tweaking of the session management settings.

But we didn't consider things like the "save current session" switch when 
you log out, and our implementation has seemed to be the source of 
problems for Nautilus users, including the bug where Nautilus constantly 
started up and quit. I hope that bug's fixed now, but I'm not 100% sure. 
Every time I see a user explain that you need to edit the session manager 
settings, I get the sense that our design failed.

> >     2) Is it OK to remember the old setting of "manage desktop" and
> > use that the next time Nautilus is invoked? The original idea was
> > that at session startup time you would run "nautilus
> > --no-default-window" which will manager the desktop if the
> > preference is on and do nothing otherwise.
>
> I would expect that to be fine. i.e. I see no real reason why running
> "nautilus --standalone-mode" or whatever should permanently toggle the
> desktop setting. In fact it shouldn't, because if you use KDE first
> and look at help in a GNOME app, then log in to GNOME for the first
> time, we need to manage the desktop.

Great, that's exactly why I made "--no-desktop" work that way in the first 
place.

> Thinking about this more, I think the best option is to leave the
> .desktop file is, don't add any options, but make Nautilus able to
> detect that the desktop is already managed and then avoid managing it.
> Also, we can set the new WM spec hint for "I am a desktop window" on
> the desktop window so kwm doesn't cover the KDE panel.
>
> To detect that the desktop is already managed, for the short term we
> use a cheesy hack "is KDE running", precise content of said hack to be
> determined, for the long term we define a real mechanism (ownership of
> the "desktop manager" selection, same as the window manager selection
> in the ICCCM).

That sounds like a really nice "do the right thing" approach to me.

    -- Darin