a pledge for updating/enhancing xsm

[Dennis Heuer]

hello all

i'm not a developer and thus in the need to beg for help in this case.

xsm is (or ever was) the only independent session manager. it is the
only alternative if one gets into trouble with established versions or
wants to create an individual, small desktop system. let me explain:

first, i didn't care about session management at all. i didn't
even use workspaces. just one and afterstep with some weird old apps.
however, with the invent of gnome i switched. gnome got 2.0 and
spatialized etc. i disliked this half-baked but quite imperative
approach more and more, also the attitude of the community. for a luck,
there was xfce. so i was able to switch to a full desktop system again.
xfce 4.2 was working, xfce 4.4 was quite nice but still to be enhanced.
however, now there's 4.6, and heaven fell down. this version is tightly
integrated. so integrated that one shouldn't touch anything. much can't
be touched at all, like this annoying sensitive window placement. i
would understand if all new windows would be "opened" only to a
side-panel to be grabbed from there or so. but placing them in the back
of the browser and calling this intelligent looks overly stupid to me. 

i couldn't get warm with this and dropped xfwm in favour to openbox.
this is when the nightmare really started out. openbox could not take
over control because, even without xfwm, the session manager held all
control and even didn't allow openbox to rename the workspaces. i
erased xfwm from disk and also all cache files etc. (from a console
session without X running). however, openbox didn't get control. and,
some xfwm files re-appeared, created by the session manager, which also
seems to be the configuration manager. this is funny because the
configuration dialogs for window management are owned by xfwm, erased
too, and also of no use to openbox. so why the hell the sessin manager
insists on holding the status quo upright? no idea. but i found that i
should also kill this app. however, there isn't any 'free' (in the
sense of non-tightly integrated) session manager except of xsm. this is
why i fell back (for the first time) to it. 

what shall i say? despite it's dusty look it works very well. i am
astonished how many apps work well with it. however, some seem to only
work via new DBus protocols of which i don't know if they are
standardized. i'd certainly like to see xsm supporting a new
freedesktop.org standard if there is any. the second thing is that xsm
remembers other apps but its own placement (including dialogs like the
log window) it doesn't remember. i'd like to see this change.

that's it, actually. yes, you shurely don't want to invest into xsm
anymore. but: what other choice is there if one seeks for a
fully uncluttered and unconstrained session manager???

many thanks for reading,
dennis heuer