Re: location management vs. session management

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Glynn Foster <glynn foster sun com> writes: 
> Yes, the way it works is probably wrong in that we really should be 
> sticking to some spec and using ID's, but I think the idea of named
> sessions is much more user friendly, if a little hacky.

You're using the session name as session ID? I don't think that will
work. ;-) IIRC the session ID has to be in Latin-1, the name has to be
in UTF-8 (for gnome 2, in locale encoding in gnome current), if
nothing else. Just keep a file mapping from name to ID, right?

> I'd quite like to do saving per-display as well, but I'm not sure if
> it's neccessary, since you can load a specific session using the
> --choose-session option. Still, it might be a useful feature to have
> gnome-session pick up on an env var and save a session named
> 'hostname:display' or something. I'm open to ideas :)

I think if you can create/name sessions, then that's good enough - you
can always manually choose the right one for each display.
 
> The way I'm currently hacking the mutli-session panel is by picking up
> on an env var that gnome-session sets and loading the appropriate
> panel session from ~/.gnome/panel.d/ and not having the option at
> the moment to have settings that apply to all panel sessions. 

This is probably close to right for the panel, but I'm not sure it's
right for all apps. But of course each app can decide this for itself.
 
> Hrm, I'm not entirely sure of this....and maybe it's because I don't
> understand this well enough [or even SM stuff well enough :)]...but
> at the moment, you could just log on to 'big screen session', use the 
> crapplet, create a new session called 'big screen session cloned' and
> then save your session...or at least, that should work.

Right, that's the simple way. ;-)
 
> AFAIK, the location management stuff is only in Ximian Setup Tools...but
> I could be wrong about this? My idea is that the location management
> stuff should really only save X/network etc.. configuration and let 
> gnome-session [multi-session] worry about the desktop.

What's an example of an X/network setting? That doesn't sound like
what location management does currently, I could be wrong though.

Havoc