Re: GNUstep and session management

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 2005-10-10 14:36:49 +0000 Adrian Robert <arobert@cogsci.ucsd.edu> wrote:

> On Oct 10, 2005, at 10:30 AM, Markus Hitter wrote:
>
> > Am 10.10.2005 um 14:09 schrieb Richard Frith-Macdonald:
> >
> >
> > > I guess the idea of a user default is best then ... if GWorkspace  is 
> > > used 
> > > as an X-windows session manager, you could use a command- line argument 
> > > to 
> > > tell it to terminate applications when it is quit.
> >
> > If any of the apps refuses to quit, GWorkspace should refuse to  quit as 
> > well. Anything else doesn't make sense, IMHO.
>
> This is what OS X does with logout -- if a user cancels exit of an  app, 
> the 
> workspace puts up a message saying logout itself was canceled.

Actually , it's not that simple ... in MacOS-X you can (for instance) use 
the ForceQuit panel to relaunch Finder (ie have it quit without terminating 
applications, and restart) and similarly you can use that panel to kill an 
application even if the application doesn't want to terminate.  Since it 
allows you to mnually kill applications, it makes some sense for it to 
refrain from quiting and let you deal with apps that don't terminate when 
asked to do so.
That's a reasonable behavior (especially for home users) ... but I see no 
reason why other people might not want to have other behaviors in their 
systems.   For instance, the procedure for a corporate user could be to -
1. ask all apps to terminate
2. wait a while, and if some apps don't terminate, perhaps raise an alert 
panel allowing the user to cancel logout
3. after a further interval, forcibly kill apps anyway.
This is good for people who want to quit, and walk away from their machine, 
knowing that there will be a logout/power-off in a short/predicatble time, 
and they don't need to worry too much about someone else coming and using 
their machine.

Anyway, abandoning logout pretty much *requires* implementation of a 
force-quit panel of some sort (a good thing IMO anyway) ... it would be a 
very bad behavior for a session manage to abandon logoff without also 
providing a mechanism to forcibly kill apps that won't die.
I know we can all use 'kill' from the unix command-line ... but the whole 
point of a graphical workspace application is to avoid people having to do 
that sort fo thing.