Comments on: Session Management Clients

By: Jon Nettleton

Jon Nettleton — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:30:48 +0000

I have been working on gnome-shell the last month and I implore you to think about session management in a light different than saving your desktop state between sessions.

With gnome-shell one of the ideas being bounced around, although not accepted by everyone is being able to organize workspaces as activities. Create a new workspace and add some launchers to the gimp, inkscape, agave etc and save that as a template. Then you launch a new graphics activity which is a workspace that has all your pre-configured applications all setup. You start working on whatever your graphics task is, but then have to work on something else. You close you Graphics activity and move on. Late when you have some free time you then go back and relaunch the activity and through session-management ( state management would be a better name here ) Your windows are all restored and documents opened to what you were working on and you don’t have to waste any time getting back to what you were doing.

By: GNOME 3 status. « andre klapper’s blog.

GNOME 3 status. « andre klapper’s blog. — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:45:34 +0000

[...] That’s not cool but the way to go until Session Management support in gtk+ gets resolved. See Thomas’ blog for a current [...]

By: Javier

Javier — Mon, 25 May 2009 18:00:12 +0000

It seems that the choice for session management in Gnome3 is EggSMClient: see http://live.gnome.org/LibgnomeMustDie

By: Javier

Javier — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:04:29 +0000

More info about Gnome session management here: http://live.gnome.org/SessionManagement/

By: Robert McQueen

Robert McQueen — Mon, 25 May 2009 12:30:29 +0000

Don’t forget there’s also a cut down XSMP implementation in Pidgin which I based on libGSMclient, a previous Havoc project which probably disappeared during the SVN -> GIT migration. It was added literally just to have Pidgin saved in the session and restarted.

Something we’re interested in seeing working session management for is to allow background killing of applications to manage RAM and CPU usage – if apps properly implement session management to save their state without interaction and can be brought back *just like they were before*, you can close stuff which isn’t the foreground app and bring it back if the user switches to it, assuming sufficient collusion between your task switcher and session manager.

By: phomes

phomes — Mon, 25 May 2009 10:45:36 +0000

Sure. I deliberately omitted my own opinion about the usefulness of session saving[1]. I know that others find it useful and will leave it at that.

My post was simply meant to draw attention to fact that while we wait for a real solution (whatever that might be) application developers are doing massive code copy/pasting to avoid regressing whatever they did before.

The discussion about what this “real solution” is best to keep in the bug. Unfortunately it looks like it is going nowhere and we are left with the ton of suck that is the current situation.

[1] I find session saving on a single computer useless. Adding something like session saving to an online service would open rocking use cases for those of us who use multiple computers/devices.

By: Havoc

Havoc — Mon, 25 May 2009 02:44:39 +0000

A real solution for _what_ is the question, right? That’s what the GTK bug is stuck on. Meanwhile everyone’s just “doing session management” for some kind of random reason with some kind of random result. It’s never worked or been useful, ever, in GNOME’s entire lifetime.

Registering to autostart is useful. Saving app state across app invocations (NOT per-session/at-session-save) is useful. Logout notification is useful.

XSMP is not useful, it isn’t even _compatible_ with those other things that are useful.