[LAU] Session management with NSM

[Harry van Haaren]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 9:42 PM, Philipp Überbacher <murks at tuxfamily.org> wrote:
> I'm just getting my toes wet with NSM and have a couple of questions.
Cool, lets see :)

> 1. NSM configuration. Is there a configuration file? I haven't seen
> anything in the manual. The default session root ($HOME/NSM Sessions) is
> quite horrible IMHO and I would have liked to configure that. Instead I
> created an alias to set the root (alias nsm='non-session-manager --
> --session-root ~/.nsm-sessions').

That's the correct way to handle this, as far as I know. Its useful to
have different directories on one system: it allows subdiving your
available sessions into groups like "albums" or
"projects-with-certain-people". Although I agree it feels a little
clunky, its quite powerful and useful.

> 2. Adding programs to sessions through the GUI ("Add Client to
> Session") is the only way? Is there no way to attach running clients
> or at least have some comfort like tab completion to add clients?
NSM does not support this "attach" workflow, but tab completion or a
list of available (fully supported) NSM clients would be a good
improvement on workflow. This should be discussed as to how best
implement it: i'm not sure.

> 3. Jack and NSM. How do you handle that? It is possible to start jack
> through NSM proxy and I guess it is OK to do that as long as jack
> reliably starts before jackpatch (something I'm not sure of). First I
> had just jackpatch in there and it started jack for me with a whole lot
> of options that are unfamiliar to me and probably not needed.

I imagine that NSM will launch said JACK apps, and if one is set to
"start JACK" on jack_client_open() in its code, then it will start
JACK with the settings in  ~/.jackdrc   Perhaps the inclusion of a
"Start JACK" type client with particular settings can be implemented
in order to handle this? I'm open for suggestions too.

> 4. CLI clients. Are they generally not supported? I added the lv2 host
> that was recommended to me (jalv) and had to do that through the NSM
> proxy, so the settings won't be saved even though the plugin (fabla in
> this case) can save its settings. This sort of defeats session
> management. With all the CLI tools we have it would be a pitty if that
> was generally not supported. On a sidenote, can someone recommend a
> plugin host that is supported?

CLI clients are supported just like clients with a GUI, there is no
difference to NSM. The issue you're encountering here is that JALV
currently doesn't support NSM, which is something that I agree needs
fixing. I'll put JALV NSM support on the TODO, its something I've
lacked myself too.

> Well, that's it for now. Last time I heard about NSM I got the
> impression that it takes care of session management once and for all,
> but the first half our gave me a different impression.
OpenAV stands behind NSM: I'm willing to do my best to cooperate with
project developers to implement NSM in various programs, and improve
the workflow of session management.

If there's any furthur questions, please ask, in the mean time, I'll
try code up some NSM :) -Harry