also sprach Victor Engmark <victor.engm...@gmail.com> [2011.11.24.1417 +0100]: > I hope you're not just being facetious. I don't know why GNOME > would decide that the current mode is better than the alternative, > and judging by the rest of the discussion so do others. If you > know then could you please enlighten us?
I am not trying to be facetious. The reason is quite simply what you are running up against right now: it is not possible to track a process which backgrounds itself in a reliable manner. However, it is trivial to background a process when calling it. The shell makes it really easy, for instance, and it's not that much harder to do in C or whatever other language. Since nobody should make any assumptions about how I call processes (assumptions like "noone ever needs to know when this process is running and when it terminates"), it is best to leave the user with as many options as possible. And by the above logic, that is simply not to background yourself. Note that there is no reason not to provide a --background or --daemonise switch, but it should be the option, not the default. A case can be made here for daemons, but not for foreground tools, IMHO. -- .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@d.o> Related projects: : :' : proud Debian developer http://debiansystem.info `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduck http://vcs-pkg.org `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems "the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." -- oscar wilde
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