Re: State of the X clipboard, and perhaps a solution

[Dan Winship <danw ximian com>]

On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 17:29 -0500, Jerry Haltom wrote:
> To satisfy both requirements imposes a restriction: the data, in
> whatever mime format is requested, must be able to be generated at the
> time of pasting. This requires that the code to generate the proper
> data, and the original data set be in memory or otherwise available at
> the time of pasting.
> 
> And here we get to the answer, maybe. The only way to satisfy the above
> requirements (that I can think of) is to keep the data and code
> available in memory during the duration that it owns the clipboard
> contents. This means long living processes of some sort.

It also means that an application is not allowed to crash if it owns the
clipboard, and in fact, that it must ignore SIGTERM/SIGINT/etc, since
the naive user most likely doesn't understand that killing the
application would result in the clipboard data going away.

You're not going to be able to make "copy" behave 100% like it copies
the data unless it actually does copy the data.

-- Dan