Re: [Patch] A clipboard daemon for gnome-settings-daemon

[Hongli Lai <h lai chello nl>]

On Saturday 06 September 2003 11:44, Mario Vukelic wrote:
> As a user, I'm genuinely interested in an explanation of why I'm doing
> something wrong and how I am supposed to know. In Windows, never ever
> has an app or a clipboard daemon said to me "Bzzzt. Wrong. You copied
> too much data to the clipboard."

If you copy a 10 MB file in Wordpad and you close it then that 10 MB stays in 
memory. Windows is no different.


> What it has done is ask me, when I exit
> an app, "Hey, you have copied a lot of data from that app to the
> clipboard. Do you want that to be available after the app exits?".

That's not the clipboard asking you to clear it, that's the application asking 
you to clear it. If the application doesn't implement explicit code to clear 
the clipboard, the data will stay in memory. Linux is no different.


> If 1 MB of data is too much for the Gnome clipboard daemon,

Why would 1 MB be too much? The size of the clipboard is only limited by your 
RAM as far as I know.


> will it tell me so when I try to copy 20 MB and explain it to me? I ask
> because when I read "when the user does this, app x is not at fault" it
> usually means
> the user is left in the dark and on his own (he should /know/ what he
> does is stupid, shouldn't he),

Frankly I find it a little hard to believe that a user would not be aware of 
the fact that he has just copied 20 MB of data to the clipboard, if he opens 
a 20 MB text file and do Select All + Copy.


> I use huge clipboards all the time: I will copy 80 slides in PowerPoint
> and paste it into another file. I will copy a pic in Photoshop and paste
> it into Word. Whatever. I will do this, because it's faster than saving
> it and use "Insert Image" in Word. I have 512 MB of RAM, why shouldn't I
> sacrifice 50 of them for the clipboard if it saves me 20 secs and a
> couple of clicks and does not hurt me in any way?

I don't understand what you're saying. Are we still talking about the same 
thing? This daemon keeps the data of the clipboard in memory, and that's 
pretty much it.