[9front] wloc - rc doesn't work because of pid

[sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9front@sirjofri.de>]

Good morning,

> contains several window commands generated by wloc.

- rio(1)

However, wloc uses the window labels to construct the commands, and rc 
labels contain the pid by default. Thus it's impossible to restore 
existing rc windows without relabelling them manually before running 
wloc.

Imo using labels to reconstruct windows isn't a good design. The only way 
to accurately restore windows is by labelling the windows when running 
applications, therefore using the windows label as some kinda 'dump' 
place (like acme Dump/Load). This can conflict with user intentions for 
custom labels.

Restoring rc windows can currently only work by running a command 
beforehand, e. g. the label command or a shell script/program controlling 
the label. However, the label is also used for display in winwatch, which 
can cause issues with workflows (e. g. I use labels in winwatch to 
describe the namespace of that window, which breaks the workflow for 
wloc).

The only out-of-the-box-solution I can currently think of is, removing 
the pid from a default rc session label.

(If you don't want to read a different design idea, you can skip to the 
end at this point.)

If I were to design a better way around that, I'd probably give rio 
windows another file (dump) which can be controlled by an application and 
is used instead of the label. The dump line would be a complete command 
to partially restore the full session, including namespace, label, and 
potentially state.

A gridchat rc session could for example put the string

   rc -c 'label gridchat; 9fs net!chat.9p.zone!9999 /n/chat'

inside the dump file, which is then used by wloc to construct the line

   window -r x y a b rc -c 'label gridchat; 9fs ...'

... you get the idea.

The design would work, but would probably also break compatibility with 
other 9 systems. However, it would also work as an addition (don't use 
wloc, but name it differently, original 9 tools can just ignore the dump 
file).

sirjofri