Autostart spec needs ordering

Havoc Pennington hp at redhat.com
Mon Dec 10 09:34:16 PST 2007


Hi,

It's probably broken if an app requires another app to start up first; 
usually there are ways to write the app to avoid the potential for that 
race.

For example, if one app talks to another via dbus, it can either wait 
passively for the other app to appear on the bus before proceeding, or 
it can start up the other app before proceeding. dbus provides both 
mechanisms.

It's a lot less complicated to do it this way, avoids any kind of race 
conditions, and does not rely on starting the apps on startup (launching 
them later would work too).

(It would be hard to do ordering in autostart anyhow, because the 
session manager doesn't necessarily know when each launched app has 
finished starting.)

Havoc



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