Session Management, Notification Area
by havoc
Mark discusses notification
area and session
management.
On notification area: I agree with Seth that the way to fix this
is to make it possible to programmatically add/remove applets with
sane results; essentially this means that applets autoposition
intelligently. I can imagine something like manually moving an applet
changes its “autoposition parameters” (left vs. right gravity, or “to
the left of some other applet”, or whatever these parameters are). So
you can still manually arrange applets, but removed applets remember
their last position in case they are re-added, and there’s a sensible
place to put a never-been-added applet.
Then maybe also do a real notification system like the one
tigert has screenshots for, with a clear spec and purpose other than
“you can put an icon in a tray.” I think the current notification area
spec is hopelessly broken in many ways, partly because there’s no
session management as Mark mentions, partly because it just sucks:
notification icons are worse than applets for applet-like things, and
they suck for doing notifications.
On the session manager, to me D-BUS is the obvious answer for starting
desktop components. Just have a list of services to be activated on
login. Only “root node” services have to be manually launched, as
“dependency” services will be launched by the app that requires them.
Getting D-BUS in GNOME 2.10 is a pretty reasonable goal.
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004-09.html#15)