sawfish/gnome-session breakage

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

[ In re. previous postings of mine, I accept that nobody will be
interested in debugging problems of sawfish in relation to very
old versions of gnome-session.  But here I'm talking about
gnome-session in Ubuntu 8.04:

allin myrtle:~$ gnome-session --version
GNOME gnome-session 2.22.1.1

It seems to me that should be supported if possible. ]

I have installed librep-0.90.0 and rep-gtk-0.18.6r2 into
/opt/sawfish.  I have /opt/sawfish/bin in my PATH and I have
/opt/sawfish/lib in /etc/ld.so.conf.  No othere *rep* stuff is on
this system.  In addition I have sawfish 1.3.5.1 and sawfish 1.5.0
compiled and ready to install, also into /opt/sawfish.  Right now
metacity is my window manager.

Experiment 1: Install sawfish 1.3.5.1.  Open the gnome-session GUI
and mark metacity as "Normal", not "Restart".  In an xterm, do

 killall metacity && sawfish &

Sawfish starts OK.  Log out via gnome GUI and log back in.
Sawfish still running OK, but the gnome "Workplace Switcher"
(version 2.22.2), which I have in one of my panels, is broken.  It
is blank, shows no "workspaces".

Experiment 2: exactly as above except that I install sawfish 1.5.0
in place of 1.3.5.1.  Again, sawfish starts OK on killing
metacity.  But this time when I log out and log back in there's no
window manager: sawfish has not been restarted.  My session has
an xterm, so I can start sawfish (or metacity) from the command
line.  If I restart sawfish the gnome workspace switcher is broken
as before.

Verdict: Please note that I'm not saying that current sawfish is
_inherently_ broken.  The breakage I'm reporting may be down to
gnome-session, which seems to be unfriendly to any WM other than
metacity from some time now.  All the same, the bottom line for
users of gnome on Ubuntu 8.04 is that sawfish doesn't work right,
with the breakage being worse for 1.5.0 than for 1.3.5.1.  Worse,
that is, in that one's selection of sawfish as WM is not preserved
between logins.

Allin Cottrell