Re: Notes on the Metacity compositor

[Dan Winship <danw novell com>]

On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 18:32 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Dan Winship wrote:
> > If compiz used workspaces instead of viewports, you wouldn't be able to
> > have a window wrapped around an edge of the cube and thus partially
> > visible on two different sides.
> 
> Just not true, afaik - that's what I mean by "the exact same 
> user-visible behavior could be done with the EWMH-workspace implementation."

Compiz could still display the window on both cube faces, but the EWMH
doesn't provide any way of explaining that state to anyone else, so
other EWMH-based tools like the pager would see the window as being on
only one face at a time (and would show it as being truncated at the
edge of that face). (Admittedly, this problem exists in the viewport
model too, but only on the edge where the left and right sides of the
virtual desktop meet, rather than at every edge.)

> I'm sure it's annoying to change at this point, of course

It's not actually; if you're not going to change compiz's visible
behavior, then you don't need to change its internal representation
either, so the only code that needs to change is to make it set/listen
to the workspace-related EWMH hints rather than the viewport ones.

-- Dan