[Geany-devel] Session Management Interim Solution Proposal

[Matthew Brush]

On 12/31/2011 03:27 PM, Lex Trotman wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Seasons greetings to all.
>
> New year new idea.
>
> Since Gnome seems to have irretrievably broken X session management it
> does not seem likely that proper session management will be solved in
> the near term.  Sadly this seems to waste all the good work that the
> guys put into the SM branch, thanks for the effort.
>
> I am going to suggest an interim change to Geany that will at least
> mean that it will re-start with the same main settings and
> preferences.  Actually two options.
>
> 1. Although I have argued against it in the past, having all settings
> save on change would at least ensure that a Geany killed by logout or
> shutdown will still restart with preference/session changes intact, or
>

It's not too bad actually, I've done it before, just keep a callback 
handler that runs when the machine is idle, then you'll just get a 
little blip here and there of activity on the disk and CPU.  Something like:

   static void on_idle_save(gpointer user_data)
   {
     /* Write out to disk here */
     g_file_replace_contents[_async] (...);
   }

   /* Call this whenever settings change */
   void queue_config_save(void)
   {
     static guint id = 0;
     if (id > 0)
       g_source_remove(id);
     id = g_idle_add_full(on_idle_save, G_PRIORITY_LOW, NULL, NULL);
   }

I don't think you'd notice any performance hit unless your config files 
were on another computer or floppy disk or something. If the GIO async 
functions are used, I don't think even that would matter since it'd run 
in another non-GUI thread.

> 2. add a user action to save preferences/session.
>

Meh, this shouldn't be something a user should have to care about IMO.

> My problems with 1. are the performance impact of writing the session
> file list every time a file is opened, closed or tabs re-ordered and
> the risk of corruption that that increase in file activity causes
> (especially with multiple instances).
>

It'd definitively need to be tested, maybe doing something to ensure the 
file access is particularly slow (like on a samba share or something) 
while testing. I think the GLib/GIO file saving functions are "atomic" 
so there shouldn't be too much issue with multiple instances writing to 
the same file.

I guess all this trouble is why GNOME applications are heading towards 
GSettings and such.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush

> My problem with 2. is I will forget to do it.
>
> Perhaps a mixed solution of preferences always saved, but session only
> when the user asks is the way to go.
>
> Any thoughts and suggestions?
>
> Cheers
> Lex
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