autostart spec updates/extensions

[Dan Winship]

Lubos Lunak wrote:
> On Sunday 08 October 2006 23:26, Dan Winship wrote:
>> So that would yield a 5-phase system: SETUP, WINDOWMANAGER, PANELS,
>> DESKTOP, and APPLICATIONS. Or something.
> 
>  Or something. Except that you again get conflicts with XSMP. For example, the 
> window manager is actually session restored.

Right. Rather than starting XSMP apps in one place and autostart apps in
another (as both GNOME and KDE do currently), you'd have to merge the
two lists of apps into one, sorted by phase/priority.

Alternatively, we could just not standardize this, and say that
"portable" autostart files will always be started "late" (ie, in the
APPLICATIONS phase in the model above). This is good enough for 90% of
apps, although there are cases like compiz, where it would be nice if
they could ship a single .desktop file that the user would copy to his
autostart dir, that would cause it to start up early in the login
sequence, regardless of what desktop you're using.

>>>> 7. XSMP
>> Yes, that was the sort of thing I was imagining. Just wasn't sure if it
>> would make sense to have it as part of the autostart spec.
> 
>  The autostart spec should first define its relation to XSMP. Which usage 
> cases for autostart do you see besides initializing/launching desktop 
> components? And of course, hacked in manual session management in apps that 
> looks a lot like what XSMP should do?

As Waldo said, this is probably most useful for desktop daemons (eg,
beagled) and systray things (eg, NetworkManager applet).

In the gnome-session rewrite, my plan was to blur the line between XSMP
and autostart, by saving the XSMP session state as autostart files. So
dragging a launcher to ~/.config/autostart would be the same as saving a
session where that app had registered itself with SmRestartAnyway.
Basically autostart would be the underlying mechanism, and XSMP would
just be an interface to autostart (and a way to get additional
non-autostart behavior like asking to be automatically restarted if you
crash). More details at
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-September/msg00084.html
(although ignore the bit about setting environment variables, since I've
decided that there are better ways to deal with that). I was thinking of
this as "GNOME's particular way of implementing the autostart spec", but
as you point out, there are some tricky bits of autostart/xsmp
integration that everyone is going to have to deal with, so maybe it
makes sense to standardize something like this?

-- Dan