Forcing Gnome to start sans metacity

[Yaakov Nemoy]

Hey List,

I'm trying to figure out how to put together a window manager package
that will integrate with the new Gnome in Fedora 10. Somehow, all the
window manager handling code in Gnome 2.24 got redone. I can't just
remove metacity and add xmonad to a session anymore. As I can figure
out,

/desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager

is the right gconf key for changing the window manager, but modifying
this caused no end of problems for xmonad.  Instead, i've set up an
~/.xsession script, that could be made into a normal script that calls
xmonad and then gnome-session.  The problem is that Gnome doesn't know
that xmonad is there, and doesn't know it doesn't actually need a
window manager anymore, let alone metacity.

Instead, i discovered that if i change

/desktop/gnome/session/required_components_list

from

[windowmanager,panel,filemanager]

to

[panel,filemanager]

then everything works fine.  The problem is, this key is shared
between all window managers that want to load up a new session.  I
can't just create a gconf .schema that will add a new one for a new
'xmonad_session' instead of a 'default_session'.

In short, the new gnome session configuration dialog is alot simpler
and alot less confusing, but it gives us no simple way to give
metacity the boot on a per session basis.  How do i go about doing
this via an RPM?

-Yaakov