GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 75047
automatically respawn
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Package: metacity Severity: enhancement Version: 2.3.55 Synopsis: suggestion: automatically respawn Bugzilla-Product: metacity Bugzilla-Component: general Description: Thou Metacity itself is stable or not, Window Manager is an important part of desktop environment. To ensure the vitality of Window Manager, the session is resposible to respawn if crash. But now Metacity passes property of non-respawn value. so session manager do not indicate Metacity to respawn. Here is a simple solution: session.c 289: char hint = SmRestartImmediately; now it's SmRestartIfRunning. defined as 0 in SM.h and I found 2 is respawn id. so I changed and succeed. I hope this commit in CVS :) ------- Bug moved to this database by unknown@bugzilla.gnome.org 2002-03-16 23:45 ------- Reassigning to the default owner of the component, hp@redhat.com.
This has to be done carefully. First we have to implement the ICCCM window manager selection, then on clean shutdown or restart we need to first change the SM restart style to never, then shutdown/restart; after those changes it should be safe to make the WM RestartImmediately, since there will be a way to switch window managers.
I think that's pretty way to guarantee perfect desktop environment. but, I couldn't find gnome-wm-properties or so in gnome-control-center-2.0 package. where is it?
WM properties is probably gone; if we implement the manager selection though, we should be able to just run "metacity --replace" to have metacity take over from the current window manager. Some other WMs already have this option.
While I agree with you Havoc, I think in the interim something needs to be done. I successfully crashed Metacity about 12 hours ago simply by changing the desktop font. Fourteen gnome-terminal2's also died immediately. (I'd report that as a seperate bug if I could reproduce it..) Anyway, the current behavior of simply dying and leaving one without a window manager is probably very unwise. If not for the panel's run dialog, I would have been unable recover. Please reconsider the above change with a README note that in order to change WMs you need to go tell gnome-session-properties to respawn before attempting to change to something else. It's an unpleasant hack which should never be allowed to be permanent, but at least the worst case scenarios will give the best behavior from the end-user perspective.
I didn't mean to give the wrong impression, fixing it correctly is not hard. It will only take 30 mins or so. So putting in a quicker hack is kind of pointless.
All done.