Re: Discontinuation of GNOME Clipboard Manager

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 09:53 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: 
> Dear all,

> Yesterday I decided to stop any future development of the GNOME
> Clipboard Manager and I will not recommend anybody picking it up.

The reason for discontinuation was, as stated in one of my replies in
the thread to Murray Cumming, the lack of many required technologies and
features on the freedesktop (which desktop environment that is, isn't
specified with that statement, which is exactly my intention).

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/2004-March/msg00048.html

For a while now, however, the freedesktop.org movement has been tackling
most of the issues!

The result lives in the XFixes extentions and the support for it in gtk
since release 2.6 (GdkEventOwnerChange). I both thank the people at
freedesktop.org and the gtk-developers for this.

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fFixesExt
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2004-May/msg00018.html

Therefor no longer recommending picking up the idea is, perhaps, unwise.

I.e. maybe there's still a demand for keeping track of the Clipboard and
storing an history, making it persistent between sessions. Making it
persistent when the component having the clipboard-selection gets
destroyed. Transferring clipboard-information to other hosts. Allow
virtualisation applications like qemu, pearpc and VMWare to interfere
with the clipboard of both guest and host windowing systems/operating
systems in a correcter, more convenient way. Making the desktop-
clipboard more scalable by letting DBUS play a role. Stuff like that.

I'm playing with the idea (but I've been playing with many idea's in the
past, while time was not always on my side) to create a clipboarddaemon-
like application that could be just that for any desktop (being both KDE
and GNOME). Communication with the process could happen using a
technology like DBUS (i.e. getting a list of stored clipboard-items,
pushing and popping the table and activating one such item).

I'm not, noway, planning to continue development of whats is, at this
moment, the module "gcm" in gnome-cvs. It's an old-style and badly
programmed Gtk+2.0 application thats using hacks and tricks to get it's
job done. It's ugly in every aspect. I have the right say stuff like
that about "gcm", simply because it's me who programmed it.

I wonder if others are interested in such a clipboard-framework and
(provided good enough) whether or not other applications would actually
also use it if widely deployed. So: Would applications integrate with
this or not?

If so. There's chances that even me, who has become so sceptical about
the clipboard on the freedesktop, might implement it. I've been planning
to learn myself use technologies like DBUS anyway. Such a project at
least smells like a good candidate for using the DBUS-technology, no?



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: philip dot vanhoof at cronos dot be
junk: philip dot vanhoof at gmail dot com
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org