It’s time to talk about session management. It might even be interesting.
The basic idea is that when you log in, you want your desktop to look like it did when you logged out. There is a program called the session manager which starts up all the programs which were running when you logged out, and tells them that they’re being restored. It is smart enough to call the window manager first. The specs which govern this, if you really want to read them, are §5 of the ICCCM and XSMP.
You can compile Metacity with session management turned off, but most people don’t. If you’re running a copy of Metacity which knows about session management, and you’re running under a session manager, then the session manager will tell Metacity to save state when you log out, and give it a session string. Metacity will write out a single file named after that string, including the position, minimised/maximised state, size, and so on of each window. When you log back in, the session manager tells Metacity the name of the file, and it will reload all the information.
This is the icky part: remember how the session runs the window manager before any of the applications? Metacity now has a list of the windows that were open before you logged out, and none of them have been opened again yet, because the applications haven’t run. So Metacity keeps a list, and when the applications start and open their windows, Metacity will place them how they were beforehand.
So what we have here is window matching. Gentle reader, when you hear the words “window matching”, you have my permission to scream bloody murder. There is simply currently no good way to do it, and so we don’t. What do we match on? The window’s title, its role, its class, or what? We don’t do window matching in Metacity, because there is no good way to do it at present. Rather, we leave that to power-user tools like Devil’s Pie, where people who really want this behaviour and have enough time to specify exactly what they want in detail can do so.
But, as you’ve noted, we do do window matching in Metacity: we just pretend we don’t. And we don’t in general, but session management forces our hand. Every time we open a window (if there’s session management going on), we make a list of session windows which were opened by the application with the same session client ID and have the same resource name and class and the same role setting. Then we use the settings of any matching window which has the same title; if we don’t find one, we use the settings of any matching window which has the same type; if we don’t find one, we give up on window matching. (“The same” above includes the case where they’re both null.)
That was pretty complicated. Add to that complexity the fact that most applications don’t even set the role and resource settings to anything useful, and you begin to see why we (supposedly) don’t do window matching in Metacity.
Now, there are five possible ways forward for us:
1) Carry on as we are.
But we have this directory “~/.metacity”, which clutters up people’s home directories and has to be cleared if they want to remove all state. “~/.metacity” only ever contains the directory “sessions”, anyway.
2) Move metacity session data to “~/.gnome2/metacity/session”.
You might think this was the obvious way forward, but it isn’t going to happen because…
3) Move metacity session data to “~/.config/metacity/session”.
As GNOME bug 518596 points out, freedesktop.org is standardising hidden directory names across all desktops. The name to use based on this idea depends whether our session files are configuration data, cached data, or some other kind of data; this has been discussed on that bug and consensus seems to be that they’re configuration data.
However, if we’re going to move to another directory, we should also consider:
4) Move metacity session data to “~/.config/metacity/session” and change the format.
The existing format is based on GMarkup, but does pretty much exactly what GMarkup is bad at. It is also generally rather inelegant. It would be very simple indeed to replace it with a GKeyFile-based system; there’s almost a one-to-one mapping with the API in many places. We’d know that files in the new place were in the new format and files in the old place in the old, and after a few years perhaps we could drop support for reading back the files in the old place (how long do people keep session files around for, anyway)?
But the most radical solution is:
5) Abolish session management (or at least session management within the window manager).
This suggestion has come from a number of people. The reasons given so far are: XSMP has so many problems that we’re better off not implementing it at all than implementing it partially; we really shouldn’t be even attempting to do this because it involves window matching, which is an impossible problem anyway; Sven Herzberg apparently gave a talk at last year’s GUADEC that said that applications should be responsible for restoring their windows because they know how to do so and the window manager can’t know in general.
Photo by Mark Norman Francis, cc-by-nc.
This post is a presentation of the ideas behind GNOME bug 521914.
