Re: Any more features?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Paul Warren <pdw@ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> Whilst I think that the features that have been suggested in the last week
> or so are good, I think that we really need to put a "feature freeze" on
> our spec, and then get the thing up to a publishable standard.
> 
> The features that have been suggested are:
> 
> _NET_PING for determining if an app is still alive when closing it.
> _NET_PID to give the WM access to the clients pid.
> _NET_INSTANCE_ID to allow association of windows and processes.
> 
> Do we definitely want to include those 3? Are there any others?

I think it is worth pointing out that these protocols/properties
are definitely getting close to session management.

The SM_CLIENT_ID property allows the unique identification
of the session managed client for a certain window, and ICE
gives you a ping command.

There are some issues with stock X11R6 session management
that need to be eventually addressed:

- How do you identify the session-management client
  for a process you fork/exec? (gnome-session uses an
  artificial client id for the -sm-client-id 
  command line argument and then assigns a real client
  ID when the connection is established.)

- How do you "snapshot" a particular app instead of the
  entire session? (E.g., you drag from the titlebar
  and create a launcher for that app, in its exact
  state). When you relaunch such an app, how does the
  window manager associate its geometry with the
  geometry that it had before?

But, my general feeling is that session-management issues
should be dealt with separately or left to a later version
of the spec. and I'd consider PING/PID/INSTANCE_ID
to be session-management issues.

The first version should concentrate on the management
of _windows_.

Regadrs,
                                        Owen