Re: sawfish/gnome-session breakage

[Christopher Roy Bratusek <zanghar freenet de>]

Am Montag, den 27.07.2009, 20:59 -0400 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
> [ 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
> 
> 

Hmm, I got an idea, what is causing the issue for gnome-session, now
there I think about:

gnome-session has changed a lot in the 2.24 cycle, therefore also
sawfish session-desktop-file changed for gnome-session 2.24. Dunno, but
perhaps this new file -which works with gnome-session 2.24+- is not
working with 2.22? Can you try sawfish 1.5, with the .desktop files from
1.3? If that is the issue, we will find a way to choose the right file
in 1.6.

Chris