[desktop-discuss] The future of GNOME session management, Sun Rays and other thin clients.

[Brian Nitz]

There is a proposal to start planning for the replacement of gnome-session:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-September/msg00084.html

Dan's proposal is to maintain a thin XSMP layer to leverage some of the 
useful things XSMP provides and avoid introducing yet another 
incompatibility with KDE.  There is some pressure in the community to 
ditch XSMP and move to a simpler (possibly dbus based) session 
management system.

I hope someone with an interest and expertise in session management can 
provide some input.  Here are some of my initial thoughts:

  - Would removing XSMP from GNOME cause migration issues or issues for 
sharing home directories with CDE  or other desktops?

  - If Trusted Solaris, A11Y or Sun Ray require any XSMP session 
management features, we should be prepared to present our case and 
reasons for keeping XSMP or we should help develop an alternative which 
would work as well.

  - Would it be possible to introduce a session manager which could 
recognize user presence and set applications to an appropriate state?  
e.g. when my Sun Ray card is removed, there is no point for applications 
such as stock ticker, browser animations or other dynamic content to be 
refreshed.  We might be able to leverage some dbus power management 
interfaces for this:

  - Would it be possible to leverage ZFS snapshot/restore features?

   - How should a session manager handle multiple logins in the same 
home directory on the same server?  How should a session manager handle 
multiple logins in the same directory from different servers (and 
potentially different versions of desktop and application software)?
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