[245] in Athena User Interface
Re: session management
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brad Thompson)
Thu Jun 29 14:52:54 2000
Message-Id: <200006291851.OAA11685@rat-thing.mit.edu>
To: tb@MIT.EDU
cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "29 Jun 2000 04:57:23 EDT."
<u1hya3o7tl8.fsf@hodge-podge.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2000 14:51:25 -0400
From: Brad Thompson <yak@MIT.EDU>
> Brad Thompson <yak@MIT.EDU> writes:
>
> > 1) If I launch gmc, I can't make it stop respawning without going to
> > the session management capplet. I never _asked_ for it to be
> > respawned, so that is pretty obnoxious.
>
> What exactly do you mean by "respawning"?
There is no "Quit" menu item in gmc. If I kill it with /bin/kill, the
session manager restarts it. Going to the "Browse running programs" item
in the session manager reveals that it thinks that gmc should respawn,
even though I never asked it to. Manually changing this setting is good
enough to make it go away until the next time I launch and kill it.
> The gnome model is that you want programs to persist across
> logout/login, or at least, if you save your session. Some people
> don't expect that, but it's not that hard to understand.
I realize that, but the application support is simply not there.
Other than gnomified applications (of which there are relatively few
that we care about), pretty much nothing supports session management.
For it to make sense to users, the behavior must be consistent, and we
cannot get consistency unless nearly all applications support it.
> But I can't be sure exactly what you're confused about, since I don't
> understand exactly what the behavior is that you are seeing.
I am confused about exactly how gnome determines what programs it thinks
are in your session. I'm sure I could figure it out by looking at the
gnome-core sources for a couple hours, but that is not a valid solution
for most people. It is clearly not "whatever you were running when you
last logged out and saved your session", because I have never done that,
and my session-managed programs have changed. This is because I have
changed them, but since the session capplet has no clear "Save" button,
I don't understand the semantics of it.
What I personally think we should do is turn off automatic session
management by default, and add a checkbox to the session capplet that
lets users turn it back on if they want. If it is off, then the "Save
my session" checkbox in the logout box should disappear. This would
eliminate the problems with session management, while giving users who
want it the ability to use it.
The two problems with this approach are:
1) It is different than the gnome default, so will require developer
resources to write and support.
2) It denies the average user a potentially useful feature.
I think (1) is not a problem because the code required should not be
that big or nasty. Someone who has looked at the gsm sources may want
to comment on this. I think (2) is not a problem because I do not think
normal users will want this feature: it is inconsistent, nondeterministic,
and buggy. However, it does provide an easy way for users to say "I
always want to launch Netscape when I log in.", and we would be taking
that away. I personally think it is a valid trade off.
yak
