Re: location management vs. session management

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Bradford Hovinen <hovinen ximian com> writes: 
> 1. Different configuration profiles may be archived, allowing one to
> switch easily between multiple configurations. This is what we are
> referring to as location management.
> 2. We can restore earlier, overwritten configuration, as in multi-level
> undo.
> 3. One can push configuration out to more than one computer, allowing
> for easier remote administration.

...
 
> I have only recently learned of the multi-session effort, and it strikes
> me that these two technologies do the same thing. As I mentioned above,
> one can easily implement multi-session support using the XML archiving
> system I devised. That would require that applications be aware of this
> system in some way, if only by knowing to specify the configuration
> moniker (or key) correctly.

Multi-session only provides feature 1, right, not the other two.

Let me toss out this idea: if there are no advantages to the archiver
for 1, I think we should use the multi-session for that. Because the
SM spec also allows saving window sizes, positions, etc. in addition
to app config (and this has to be done by the window manager, we can't
store it in apps).  Also, the SM spec is cross-desktop and
cross-app. e.g. I'm trying to get it supported in Mozilla, because
Sawfish's incorrect placement of Mozilla drives me crazy. ;-)

Of course a specific app, such as a control panel, could use
bonobo-conf to store the per-session data, etc.

If that sounds OK, the remaining question would be, how do features 2
and 3 work in a multi-session world. That is, is the undo list
per-session?

I guess 3 can't have a relation to multisession, since it's for system
settings and sessions are per-user.

I really think the resulting UI will be scary if we have both
multi-session and the separate location management concept, unless we
can think of some logical interaction, so I think this is a pretty
important issue to resolve. How do you think we should approach it?

Havoc