GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 506311
Auto start on login if running on logout
Last modified: 2010-03-24 21:20:04 UTC
Empathy seems to always autostart when a user logs in. The user has to go to preferences->sessions and disable Empathy in the list of autostarted applications to turn it off. I think it would be better to automatically remember if Empathy was running or not when the user logged out. Havoc recently mentioned they did something like this for Mugshot by dynamically adding/removing a file to the auto-start machinery (I think... can't locate thread right now).
As the resolution has been to not install an autostart file anymore, I believe this bug can be closed. Thanks for your time.
Well, not really. Automatically remembering if Empathy was running or not would still be a neat feature. I'm changing the title. (Feel free to close it again if you disagree. :)
I believe Empathy now gets handled just like any other applications and will be restored if saved as part of a session; but I confess I didn't check this.
But handling this with the session machinery is not good enough IMHO. It should be transparent to the user.
I should say, not good enough for this use case. I believe that's why the Mugshot people worked around it.
Why isn't it enough? all applications are restored by gnome-session why is empathy an exception?
It's not "good enough" for the simple reason that it is not automatic. (It requires an extra step... enabling a checkbox, which I can't even find it in Hardy, or doing the system->preferences->yada yada dance...) I'm pretty vexed at not finding Havoc's mail. Maybe you can talk to him on IRC. Or maybe I misremember (though I don't think so).
That's not empathy's fault if gnome-session's UI is hidden and boggus. We need a good reason to do that at empathy's level instead of let gnome-session do it.
Well, will apps be able to say "I want to be started the next time the user logs in without him having to choose save session or some such" with the new session stuff that's been brewing for a while? If not, maybe it can be fixed. Anyway, I don't care about the mechanism per se. If doing it the way I believe Mugshot is doing it right now works, why not do it in Empathy too? (I should say I don't know how much work it entails since I haven't looked at the Mugshot code...) The IMHO important thing from an interaction design stand point is that it's completely automatic. If you don't agree with that, feel free to close the bug. :)
I'm not going to reinvent the wheel in empathy. That's something that need to be handled by gnome-session, if it doesn't do that job well I guess that's a bug there... I don't see why every application should do it's own session handling just because gnome-session don't do its job correctly. I'm closing WONTFIX, please feel free to open a bug against gnome-session if it doesn't do the correct job.
http://live.gnome.org/SessionManagement/NewGnomeSession Hopefully this will be in GNOME 2.24. Reopening. (Since, as I said, this bug really isn't about the mechanism but the behaviour and with the new GNOME session stuff it looks like it's solvable in a nice way. Right?)
Oh, and I just now found Havoc's comments about how they work around it in Mugshot. See bug 79285 comment 14. That particular workaround is moot with the new session management Lucas is working on but Havoc, as always, has some very insightful comments. :)
*** Bug 540554 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
As it has been said, gnome-session should restart Empathy if needed. Closing this bug.
Does this mean that Empathy now uses AutostartCondition and will be automatically started by gnome-session if it was running when the user logged out? And if it wasn't running on logout, it won't start?