Re: Graceful termination again

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 23 Jan 2006, at 16:38, Fred Kiefer wrote:

> Roman Belenov wrote:
> > 1) How to get a list of all running GNUstep applications ?
> > launchedApplications seems to return only the list of apps  
> > launched from the
> > current one. For now I just use a list of message ports obtained  
> > by examining
> > corresponding subdirectory and treat everythying as a proxy for  
> > application.
>
> We really should get [NSWorkspace launchedApplications] working. Some
> years ago I suggested a solution for this involving some  
> extensisons to
> gdomap. Now with gdomap being used less often we will need a more
> general way to implement it. Perhaps there is the possibility to  
> extend
> NSPortnameServer (or rather its subclasses) to return a list of all
> known ports. The NSWorkspace method would then only need to filter out
> the no longer working ports and restict the returned list to the ones
> representing applications.
>
> Richard,
> do you like that concept and would you be willing to implement the  
> base
> part of it? More or less it would be an official implementation of  
> what
> Roman is doing anyway.

I think the concept is fundamentally broken ... since the list of  
ports is not the list of applications, so you would need to filter  
them in some way (which probably means an intrusive probe of some  
sort applied to all the ports which are not application ports), and  
while any programs using ports should not care about being sent  
unexpected messages, they are entitled to be annoyed by it.

The issue needs fixing at the gui library level, listing launched  
applications is not an issue for the base library and is not related  
to ports except in a very incidental manner.

We could finish getting the NSWorkspace class to do what it was  
originally designed to do ... provide the list of launched apps as  
supplied by the workspace manager.  That would be a small  
modification to NSWorkspace and to GWorkspace.  However, we would  
want some fallback option for if/when GWorkspace is not running.   
Perhaps a minimal workspace manager daemon, or perhaps NSWorkspace  
could write to a small database (eg a plist file in a temporary  
directory) to maintain the state information.  The latter has the  
advantages of not requiring an additional daemon to run (I have no  
problem with daemons, but I know many people have objections to them)  
and is persistent if the workspace manager is restarted (we need  
that).  The former has the advantages that it would provide a testbed  
and reference implementation for workspace managers.  I suppose we  
could do both.