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

[Alan <alan ufies org>]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 01:03:47PM -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 09:16 -0500, Jerry Haltom wrote:
> 
> > > 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.
> > 
> > What sends SIGTERM? The window manager certainly doesn't. If the user
> > purposely kills a locked process, I don't think we HAVE to preserve the
> > data.
> 
> 
> if a user closes an application, I don't think we HAVE to preserve the
> clipboard selection either :-)

Well, if you think of it analagus to real world items, you could
consider it as taking a photo album out of the desk, looking through it
and selecting a picture you want to put in a letter to your grandmother,
putting the photo album back in the desk, and try to put it in your
letter and finding that the photo has disappeared.

GNOME is going for the KISS principle and as others have mentioned, if
you come from the mac or windows world having your clipboard contents go
away when an app closes is very strange and counter intuitive.  This has
been a problem for *ages* with X and I've heard countless bitchings from
people about it.  I don't think it's a "you're not using it right" or a
"you don't understand how it works or should work" problem, it's a
problem with the technology.  Besides, nothing is lost if clipboard
contents are persistant, I can't see how this "feature" is useful to
anyone.

alan
-- 
Alan <alan ufies org> - http://arcterex.net
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