Session Management Considerations

[Matthias Ettrich]

Thanks for the wonderful responses to my reworked session manager, no
response is also a response ;-)

I had more time thinking about it and I believe we can (and should)
make things as simple as possible.

There seem to be three kinds of users:

 a) those who always want a fresh and clean desktop when they log in

 b) those who would like to have their desktop exactly the way they
   left it when they logged out

 c) those who want a well-defined desktop when they log in

 c') those who want to pick one of many well-defined desktops when 
    they log in. I do not know why, but there seem to be cases
    where this is useful.


KDE used to make a)-c) possible, but in a way that was so confusing
for many that it ended up as FAQ. And sometimes you really wanted to
remove your ksmserverrc manually, which wasn't ideal either.

Here's my new and simplified scheme. If nobody objects or comes with
something better, I'll implement it early next week.

1. the "save session for future logins" or whatever it is called
   today) checkbox in the logout dialog will go away.

   Instead, we _always_ save the current session during shutdown. The
   reason I didn't want that in the first place was that it takes a bit
   of time to save the data, but I do not believe this to be an issue
   anymore. But we don't save the session as "default session as we
   used to, but as "last session".

2. We need a new command to save the current session as "saved
   session" to support user c). The current way with
	Alt-F2 dcop ksmserver default saveCurrentSessionAs saved
   is not exactly userfriendy.

   The command may be in the K-Menu above or below "Lock screen". Or
   we hide it a bit deeper, suggestions welcome. 

3. startkde together with ksmser will support the following 
   command line arguments:

	  startkde
          starkde --last-session
          startkde --saved-session

   and to support user type c' we can also support

	  startkde --session <name>

   and  - if somebody feels like implementing it - 

          startkde --query-session

   which shows a modal selection-GUI for the existing sessions.


4. In KDM, we don't just have KDE, but 

            KDE
            KDE (last session)
            KDE (saved session)

5. Non-KDM users that start kde from the console will have to
   extend their scripts to pass the option they want  on to 
   startkde.


If you wonder why we didn't do it this way right at the beginning,
well, it wasn't possible. The new scheme requires being able to take
the default session and save it as saved or as last session. This kind
of session renaming or data duplication was not possible before we
started tagging the data per saveYourself message.

Suggestions very much welcome. Does the new scheme look simpler, more
logical to you? Will users get the three choices in KDM? Any
alternative suggestions?


Matthias