We need clients that can survive an X restart.

We need clients that can survive an X restart.

> GTK+ has had for years the ability to disconnect from one display and
> reconnect to another, which also means that you can connect it to a dummy
> display while your real display restarts.

There is a missing piece here though. The GTK+ code can successfully
migrate an X connection through a client-initiated disconnect. But it
turns out that design flaws in Xlib make it impossible for a client
to cleanly recover from an X server that disappears out from under the
client.

I've actually looked into what it would take to retrofit Xlib to add
what's missing. It'd be possible, but it would require a programmer
with a stronger constitution than I have to wade through the Xlib
internals to make the fix. And then one would still need to fixup
GTK+ to properly respond to the new XServerDisconnected event that
would have to be added.

Meanwhile, a more realistic approach is to get toolkits to switch to
XCB which doesn't suffer from the same shortcoming as Xlib in this area.

> However this toolkit capability has been long neglected by application
> writers.

I agree that there are some interesting aspects of migrating applications
from one X server to another that applications aren't taking advantage of.

But for the idea of replacing an X server for an entire session---I'd much
rather that be something that not require any application knowledge at all.
That's a much quicker route to making it work reliably for as many
applications as possible.

-Carl