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List:       kde-panel-devel
Subject:    Reshuffling startup to start activity manager after ksmserver
From:       Simon Persson <simonpersson1 () gmail ! com>
Date:       2013-05-25 10:38:49
Message-ID: fe58e94a-aad1-4e82-abc6-024f5a907bed () gmail ! com
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Hello,

After seeing Kevin Ottens suggestion for a "Welcome" activity (1) I decided to 
try setting up such an activity.

I want this to be the only activity that is started at boot/login to give a fast boot \
since many times I'm not gonna do same activity as what I did when I last shut down \
my laptop. I also agree that this first activity should not be made special other \
than by configuration. It could perhaps be an idea to make a special "welcome" applet \
or desktop containment and by default have that one configured to be shown only in \
this default activity. That welcome applet can then show a list of other available \
activities for easy starting. It could also have a button for the discussed function \
of "move all windows from this activity to a newly created one".

For my experiment I decided to show the desktop component of homerun in the "Welcome" \
activity which gets me pretty close to what I want.

So much for the background, now the problem:
I wanted to use the "restore manually saved session" option of ksmserver in order to \
always start the "Welcome" activity and nothing else. But kactivitymanagerd does not \
communicate with the session manager, it always keeps its rc-file updated with which \
activities are running and which is the current one. It then resumes to that state \
upon startup.

I started looking into making the activity manager speak to the session manager, but \
ten years of writing kde applications and using kde full time has taught me very \
little about how the session startup works.

Currently it seems kactivitymanagerd is started via klauncher by some kded module, \
and that happens before the start of ksmserver. If I add "--no-kded" option to \
kdeinit4 in the startkde script then the activity manager gets started after \
ksmserver and can work the way I want it to.

1: Ivan, do you agree that it would be desirable to make kactivitymanagerd only save \
state in the QApplication::saveState() function? At least when the "resume last \
session" option is not active?

2: If so, how should things be reshuffled to make it start after the session manager? \
Is it even possible? Looks possible to me, first thing that seems to need it is kwin, \
which is started after ksmserver.

I'm not currently involved in any of these projects but I have been thinking of the \
need for a session manager in a wayland-world and that it could be interesting for me \
to get involved with that. This issue then serves as a good reason to learn more \
about these things. I've already spent two days on this and learned a lot.

If you read all the way here, thank you.
Simon

(1) http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2013-May/025153.html
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