Pointless tangent (Was Re: F11: xorg decision to disable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace)

[Callum Lerwick]

On Sun, 2009-03-29 at 22:44 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>  Firefox does this by saving its session every time you hit a new
> page. 
>  It's actually remarkably difficult to handle the "My X server has gone 
>  away" case - traditional xlib behaviour is to just abort() your process. 
>  You can do some funky stuff involving signal handlers and longjmp, but 
>  by and large it's not practical to save app state when the server is 
>  killed.  
And yet somehow many existing apps manage to do it...

A resilient app has to be able to handle having the plug pulled with no
warning anyway.

>  Especially if your application isn't an X one and just happens 
>  to run in a console. 
On the console we've had this thing called SIGHUP for the last few
decades...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGHUP