[RFC] add a shutdown event

[Daniel Barlow]

<bikeshedding>

On 17 March 2013 22:59, Sylvain BERTRAND <sylware at legeek.net> wrote:
> Is the socket disconnect not enough information for the clients?

The salient question is: "what would you do differently as a client
given a shutdown message than you would do given a SIGPIPE or an EPIPE
error?"

Whatever it is, it can't involve showing or asking the user anything
on the display that's going away.  If you were going to save your
state in an orderly fashion, or to go into hibernation until you're
directed to open a new connection, you should probably do that
irrespective of the manner of your disconnect.  Use cases, anyone?
Supposing you were playing mp3s, would you behave differently on crash
vs shutdown?

It's not quite the same issue as crash-only software, but it's
philosophically similar: if you have to write the code to cope with
"compositor crashed unexpectedly" anyway, is the code for "I got a
shutdown message" ever going to be different from it?

</bikeshedding>

-dan

-- 
dan at telent.net
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