Unified autostart scripts directory

[John (J5) Palmieri]

Again, focus.  This is too broad.

On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 13:40 +0200, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis) wrote:
> From comments elsewhere in the thread we seam to have the following for the 
> different desktops:
> - KDE	
>   $KDEDIRS/Autostart
>   $KDEDIRS/env	
> - ROX:
>   $CHOICES/ROX-Session/AutoStart	
>   $CHOICES/ROX-Session/Environment
> - XFCE:
>   ~/Desktop/Autostart
> - Fluxbox:
>   ~/.fluxbox/startup		
> - GNOME:
>   ?
> 
> possible extentions/related problems mentioned:
> * only start for specific desktops (Use OnlyShowIn or similar?)
> * start/run things on other events then startup
>   - shutdown  (obvious extension)

Not so sure about this.  Give me a use-case because it is not obvious.
In an an environment where the plug could be pulled at any time you
can't be sure this will ever be run.

>   - mount of media (see gnome-volume-manager)

gnome-volume-manager is just policy.  There are already a standard set
of signals as defined by HAL.  This does not belong in the discussion. 

>   - keypresses

Why?  Again show me a use-case.  

> * complete desktop services framework
> * dependencies between autostarting applications
> 
> As a first attempt I envision a simple spec that does the following:
> - define a number of events for which we'll provide hooks: maybe have both 
> standard and optional events (e.g. startup and shutdown as standard, 
> on-mount-media, on-keypress as optional)

Focus only on starting applications and daemons on login.  There are
enough details there to keep us busy.  I don't know if I even want to
define D-Bus as a requirement yet which is why I proposed a wrapper that
could hide those implementation details. 

> - for each of these standard events provide a standard location for the user 
> to put his .desktop files to be run/ scripts to be sourced
> 
> This would give us something like:
> - $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/run-at/<event>/execute: contains desktop files to run 
> when <event> happens (use OnlyShowIn or similar to restrict to certain 
> dest)
> - $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/run-at/<event>/source: contains scripts to be sourced 
> when <event> happens (pass desktop-name as parameter to allow to do things 
> for some desktops only?)
> - events:
>   * standard events [startup, shutdown]
>   * optional events ?

Lets get off this whole "events" system (which is already being worked
on in HAL). And focus on one use-case that we all agree is needed which
is start on login. We need to learn to walk before we can run. 

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>