autostart of app(s) while weston starts

[Quentin Glidic]

On 2015-06-25 08:45, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Jun 2015 09:25:36 -0700
> Bill Spitzak <spitzak at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 2:05 AM, Pekka Paalanen <ppaalanen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, 24 Jun 2015 09:40:51 +0200
>>> Christian Hartmann <cornogle at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> is it possible to autostart of app(s) while weston starts ??
>>>> Would be nice to have such an feature, if its not present yet,
>>>> I can sent an email to wayland-devel-request :) *if its not done
>>>> already by another user*

We probably want XDG autostart here.
It is already well-defined and simple enough, IMO.


>>> It's a missing feature:
>>>
>>> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2014-October/017971.html
>>>
>>> In summary, there were patches to implement it in weston-desktop-shell,
>>> but that will misbehave if weston-desktop-shell ever restarts
>>> (crashes): it would launch the apps again. So it should be implemented
>>> in Weston.
>>>
>>> So far no-one has had the time to get back to that, AFAIK.
>>>
>>
>> It seems like it would be possible for Weston to pass a switch or
>> environment variable telling the shell that it is being restarted rather
>> than the initial run. It does make more sense for this to be in the shell.
> 
> It will be in the shell, but not the shell helper program.

I do think we want that in the shell helper program.
Easy solution: the desktop-shell interface trigger an event saying
“first run, go autostart”.


I see one big point for it: using .desktop files. As they are used in
(XDG) autostart and could easily be used in launchers too.


Another reason is the (X11 world) no-DE use case.
I use a slightly customized environment full of PATH tweaks and exports.
I really want my client application (my IDE or my web browser) to have
and use that env, otherwise some features would just break.
To do that using Weston, I need to run the helper program using my
shell. I see that as a neat parallel of running my WM using my shell
under X11. (The same way I used to run "gnome-session" using my shell too.)

In Weston, I see the shell plugin *and* helper program as the X11 WM.
The drawing part is delegated to the helper program but also the
launching part.
Doing autostart in the compositor process would break this use case.


As a minor point, we also limit the fd leak and other bug/crash causes
from the compositor itself, while it is “easy” to just restart the
helper program.

-- 

Quentin “Sardem FF7” Glidic