Re: [NSWorkspace launchedApplications] issue

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 2 Aug 2007, at 07:52, Truls Becken wrote:

> On 8/1/07, Andreas Höschler <ahoesch@smartsoft.de> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > as the name implies launchedApplications is supposed to return only
> > launched applications. On MacOSX this works as expected. Under  
> > GNUstep
> > (also with the latest release) I get the full set of installed
> > applications (whether they are running or not).
> >
> > Is there a workaround for this bug? Is see that determining this list
> > is no easy task since it requires some kind of registration  
> > mechanism.
> > What's the current approach in GNUstep for doing that?
> >
> > I just found some GSDock sources that work ok on MacOSX but not at  
> > all
> > under GNUstep, mainly because GSDock is based on this
> > launchedApplications method of NSWorkspace which seems to be  
> > broken in
> > GNUstep.
>
> The documentation for launchedApplications warns that the result is
> not guaranteed to be up to date. As Yen-Ju mentioned, this is mainly
> because crashed applications don't notify NSWorkspace when they
> terminate.
>
> That being said, when I have experimented with launchedApplications on
> earlier releases, it has worked as documented. It has given
> satisfactory results, except when I have killed applications in some
> kind of rude way. You should therefore feel free to file a bug report
> about getting all installed applications.
>
> It would also be nice if NSWorkspace in some way managed to always
> know the correct set of running applications, but I guess that would
> require some kind of probing which would affect performance. And not
> only when someone asks what is running, but periodically as it's
> possible to receive notifications when apps launch or terminate. Since
> NSWorkspace knows the PID for each application, checking whether the
> process still exists might be good enough.

Yeah ... I've just finished modifying the code to do two things ...
1. check that the pids still exist every time launchedApplications is  
called... not an infallable check for removing dead apps (as the pid  
can be re-used), but pretty good generally.
2. check that the apps are still responding if it's more than 30  
seconds since the last time launchedApplications was called.

I'm not sure that (2) is a good idea though ... the check has the  
potential to be very slow and can potentially remove an app from the  
list when it's only temporarily not responding, rather than  
permanently hung.  Thoughts?