Reshuffling startup to start activity manager after ksmserver

[Daniel Nicoletti]

It's started by kdeinit on phase 0 or 1 don't remember now,
just add the X-KDE-Init-Phase=2 to the desktop file and it should
work

2013/5/25 Simon Persson <simonpersson1 at gmail.com>:
> Hello,
>
> After seeing Kevin Ottens suggestion for a "Welcome" activity (1) I decided
> to try setting up such an activity.
>
> I want this to be the only activity that is started at boot/login to give a
> fast boot since many times I'm not gonna do same activity as what I did when
> I last shut down my laptop.
> I also agree that this first activity should not be made special other than
> by configuration. It could perhaps be an idea to make a special "welcome"
> applet or desktop containment and by default have that one configured to be
> shown only in this default activity. That welcome applet can then show a
> list of other available activities for easy starting. It could also have a
> button for the discussed function of "move all windows from this activity to
> a newly created one".
>
> For my experiment I decided to show the desktop component of homerun in the
> "Welcome" activity which gets me pretty close to what I want.
>
> So much for the background, now the problem:
> I wanted to use the "restore manually saved session" option of ksmserver in
> order to always start the "Welcome" activity and nothing else.
> But kactivitymanagerd does not communicate with the session manager, it
> always keeps its rc-file updated with which activities are running and which
> is the current one. It then resumes to that state upon startup.
>
> I started looking into making the activity manager speak to the session
> manager, but ten years of writing kde applications and using kde full time
> has taught me very little about how the session startup works.
>
> Currently it seems kactivitymanagerd is started via klauncher by some kded
> module, and that happens before the start of ksmserver. If I add "--no-kded"
> option to kdeinit4 in the startkde script then the activity manager gets
> started after ksmserver and can work the way I want it to.
>
> 1: Ivan, do you agree that it would be desirable to make kactivitymanagerd
> only save state in the QApplication::saveState() function? At least when the
> "resume last session" option is not active?
>
> 2: If so, how should things be reshuffled to make it start after the session
> manager? Is it even possible? Looks possible to me, first thing that seems
> to need it is kwin, which is started after ksmserver.
>
> I'm not currently involved in any of these projects but I have been thinking
> of the need for a session manager in a wayland-world and that it could be
> interesting for me to get involved with that. This issue then serves as a
> good reason to learn more about these things. I've already spent two days on
> this and learned a lot.
>
> If you read all the way here, thank you.
> Simon
>
> (1) http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2013-May/025153.html
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-- 
Daniel Nicoletti

KDE Developer - http://dantti.wordpress.com