Most likely we'll see _a lot_ of bugs in the future (already had some) where settings do not apply because the settings helper is not running. We need a way to indicate the daemon is not running, or automatically start it when the settings manager opens or a setting is changed. I know the settings helper should start during login, but when it dies during the session, it's not restarted and all the user will experience is 'broken settings'. So, we either check if it running, some way or another, and/or we implement session management (auto restart). (Made this bug block 4.6 and some higher priority, because it's a serious problem IMHO).
Yeah, I was thinking about implementing SM. It's a little annoying tho, because to do it correctly for new and existing users with or without saved sessions, we have to: 1. Make xfce4-settings-helper session-managed and use SmRestartImmediately. 2. Put xfce4-settings-helper in the failsafe session. 3. Put a .desktop in autostart. 4. Have xfce4-settings-helper figure out on startup if it's being restored via the session manager, and disable the autostart item if so, *before* registering with the session manager. Doing this check on every single startup is pretty lame. To be safe, we should also "uniqueify" xfce4-settings-helper by either grabbing an X manager selection, or owning a dbus name. Since the settings helper doesn't already depend on dbus (at least not directly, of course it depends on dbus through libxfconf), I think I'd rather it just own a selection. I'll look into this tomorrow, I guess.
K, this is done.