the 'failsafe' session

[Havoc Pennington]

On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 00:10 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> So, this came up as a sidepoint in another bug.
> 
> Say, you're a user, your mouse isn't working. You try and
> log into a failsafe session to fix it.
> 
> You're now screwed because:
> 
> a) if you start an app, it may not have focus
> b) there's no keysequence to change focus, unless you're an X guru
> 
> Is this a situation we really care about? What do we expect
> people to use the failsafe session for, in practice?
> 

For it to be useful for desktop users, it would probably 
have to start a regular desktop but just ignore 
your configuration (especially your session file).

I guess it might be good for bugs like the classic
"vertical panel crashes on login" or losing the 
panel from your session.

The effort to implement a useful failsafe mode 
might be better spent making the session manager
detect hosed states (missing panel, respawns, crashes)
and recover cleanly/automatically, though.

Havoc