[openbox] feature suggestion

[Dana Jansens]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 2:28 AM, Jorge Almeida <jjalmeida at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 10:50 PM, Mikael Magnusson <mikachu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 19 October 2011 23:37, Dana Jansens <dana at orodu.net> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 5:25 PM, Jorge Almeida <jjalmeida at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I meant running something at a different path than what was currently
>>> running. :)
>>
>> You can pass another binary to the Restart action, but not to the
>> --restart command line option. This is not a problem with the command
>> line parser, but rather how to send a whole string to the running
>> openbox process. The message you send over X lets you pass a few
>> integers, so right now we have something like 1 = exit, 2 = restart,
>> then there aren't really many more useful things you can do with no
>> parameters.
>>
> OK. The Restart action is the one I find more useful, anyway, and it is
> a really cool feature. Maybe no other WM has it?
>
> Anyway, in case the restarting from command line is important to
> someone, it might be easily implemented: have the running openbox read a
> hardcoded file when "openbox --restart" is run (I'm assuming this sends
> a signal to the running openbox, which is trapped).The file (say,
> ~/.config/openbox/restartparams) would contain the string... Or, maybe
> better, the file itself would be [a symlink to] the executable to
> replace the running openbox (less code, no need to read a file)

FWIW the openbox you're running --restart on and the one acting as WM
could be on different machines, so all communication needs to go
strictly through the XServer.  It's possible of course to do this, we
just didn't code the mechanism for it (yet).