Re: GNUstep and session management

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 2005-10-07 06:40:21 +0000 Roman Belenov <rbelenov@yandex.ru> wrote:

> Markus Hitter <mah@jump-ing.de> writes:
>
> > > Is there a fallback for applications that don't explicitly observe  this
> > > notification (like passing terminate: to NSApplication instance) ?
> >
> > Since about any Mac OS X app bases on NSApplication and NSApplication 
> > handles
> > this, there's no need for a fallback mechanism.
>
> Do you mean that NSApplication observes NSWorkspaceWillPowerOffNotification
> internally ? That doesn't seems reasonable (it would rely on notification
> processing order in current implementation, since reference manual mentions
> that it is undefined); anyway, is there some documentation confirming this ?

I think he probably either misunderstood your question ... this thread is 
quite confusing.

To clarify ...

1. In GNUstep there is no mechanism for a session manager to shut down an 
application, but there *IS* a mechanism for a session manager to send an 
NSWorkspaceWillPowerOffNotification to all applications.
2. In MacOS-X, there is some *undocumented* mechanism for a session-manager 
to shut down applications.
3. In both cases, the actual graceful shutdown should result in delivery of 
an NSWorkspaceWillPowerOffNotification within the application, followed by a 
-terminate message to the NSApp instance (which in turn sends a message to 
the application delegate so that it can clean up).

I think we should provide a (documented) mechanism to shut down an 
application for GNUstep.  This should probably be some message that the 
application will respond to like -powerOff, which will send a local 
NSWorkspaceWillPowerOffNotification within the receiving application and 
then call [NSApp terminate].