Introducing the Session Save/Restore Initiative

[ebassi (Emmanuele Bassi)]

@gwillems

Is it really unavoidable? Are there usecase examples that require async shutdown?

The main issue is that the entire system is currently asynchronous:

• user closes app A
• app A starts saving its state while the windows are closed
• app A relinquishes the name on the session bus
• user starts app A again
• the system instantiates app A while the previous instance is still busy saving state
• there is no state for the new app A instance to restore
• the state for the old app A instance is dropped

This will lead to data loss and an inconsistent state.

We discussed various approaches at the GTK hackfest in February, and we have a few ideas we wish to iterate early in the next development cycle, before committing to an API.

@gwillems

My concern is that for implementing the saving support on Windows, the shutdown APIs are synchronous, we are supposed to respond to the system notification once done, after which the system will attempt to kill the app.

Getting things right on Linux is the priority; we are aware that other platforms have more synchronous approaches, so we need to ensure that Linux is covered.