unity-design team mailing list archive

[Sense Hofstede <qense@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 19 May 2010 19:59, Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 19/05/10 18:20, Jeremy Nickurak wrote:
>> What about rhythmox content sharing?
>>
>> If rhythmbox is sharing content via one of its plugins, when you close
>> it, you don't want it to go a way... you want it to be a background
>> service. Closing the window expecting it to still be sharing is a gap
>> here.
>>
>> This would seem to be a good reason to say that the connection between
>> closing a window and exiting a window is probably too complex to get
>> right.... even if you get it right, the users won't understand the
>> logic of what's happening.
>>
>> For consistency sake, closing the rhythmbox window should either
>> ALWAYS keep the service running in the bg, or ALWAYS kill the
>> service... and I'd suggest the former is safer. If it's not actually
>> getting used in any way, it should be getting swapped out to disk,
>> brought back into memory when it's required (either as a result of
>> local or remote user action).
>>
>
> Hmm... that's interesting :-).
>
> Simplistically, I would say that "if content is actively being shared,
> it should continue to run unless File->Quit is selected".
>
> MPT?
>
> Mark
>
>

Seems similar to the run-only-on-demand approach Ubuntu seems to take
on several daemons and backends. Only start applications like
Rhythmbox when the users starts them, but leave them running
afterwards.

What needs to be checked, though, is whether the applications that are
ought to show this behaviour can handle being exited by shut down
properly; e.g. don't tell the user it exited unexpectedly the last
time when the user shut the system down, which is what Chromium seems
to be doing right now. (Though not reliably.)

Regards,
-- 
Sense Hofstede
[ˈsɛn.sə ˈɦɔf.steː.də]