GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 91689
'These apps not session-managed' dialog is unpleasant
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
The dialog that pops up when you log out telling you that some apps are not session managed needs some rethinking; it's the sort of detail users shouldn't have to care about. At the very least it should timeout, as there's nothing worse than thinking you've shut down your machine, only to come back the next morning to find you've got a dialog burned into your monitor.
Without the dialog I get an endless stream of "app XYZ does not get saved" bugs. I'm not sure how else to address that. The dialog is intended to encourage the bugs to go to the apps, instead of to me, so the apps actually get fixed. You can get many other dialogs in the same situation - e.g. if you have any unsaved documents, dialogs for that will come up on logout.
Since you can tell which applications are affected, how about if you store the list somewhere (a Gconf key perhaps), and check its contents on startup next time? That way you could tell the user what apps they need to manually restart just after they've logged in, which is a lot more useful than being told just as they're logging out-- it could be days before they log in again.
Could work. It does mean that the windows referred to aren't open to see what they are - so it could be a little more decontextualized and hard to figure out, perhaps?
Hmm, maybe, but probably not any harder than if the windows in question are on a different workspace when you logout...? Of course if you implemented this scheme you could go the whole hog, forget about any popup messages, and just try to re-run said applications at next login and to hell with the fact that the previous document/window position etc. weren't re-loaded. But I guess that might just generate even more bugs about session management being broken for some apps :)
If I could just magically restore non-SM apps I wouldn't bother with the dialog. ;-) The purpose of this dialog is to create pressure on app authors, so in some sense its purpose is to suck... people are too lazy to implement SM.
Ximian has a patch to time this out in their package that we may want to add.
we already committed that right after XD2 was released. What the heck, RESOLVED/FIXED it is!