Re: Request for freeze break -- feature & string freeze for 2.14.x cycle

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On 4/13/06, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> wrote:

> Just wondering before giving an approval: what are the plans in the
> future wrt to this? Do you plan to keep this option? Or do you think we
> can have a better solution?

I believe this patch is the better solution to the strict focus
patches that have been around for years and by demand found their way
into Debian, Ubuntu, and RHEL despite their kludgy nature.  Those
other patches existed because there were complaints that "Sometimes
windows take focus when I don't want them to!".  The "solution" in
those other patches was to just never focus new windows.  Period. 
(Why anyone would think that the run application dialog shouldn't be
focused when the user presses Alt+F2 is beyond me.  Or the open file
dialog when the user pressed Ctrl+O in some app.  Or a variety of
other cases.  But, it appears that some users never do those things
and thus didn't mind such a kludge)  Focus-stealing-prevention didn't
mitigate demand for this "dont-focus-new-windows" feature either,
surprisingly.

The strict focus option introduced by this patch puts some rationale
behind the use cases for why users wouldn't want to focus new windows
(besides focus stealing prevention stuff) and only takes effect in
those cases instead of kludging it in everywhere.  By doing that, it
became useful to a wider group of people (e.g. me) and I have reports
from others that wanted the "don't-focus-new-windows" behavior that it
solved their problem.

Since this option solves a very common complaint (one of only two
options I've ever found that had sufficient complaints/requests in
order to get multiple major distros to patch in a kludgy option for
it), and it has a decent usability rationale (even if for a niche set
of users), I think it should stay.  I've applied it to HEAD and it
will be an option in 2.16 and beyond.  I'd take an even better
solution if one existed, but I really doubt one does at this point.

> I believe it only affects the terminal, but there are mentions of other
> apps in the bug, so I'm a bit lost here. Was it because users were still
> using an old metacity with the first buggy version of the strict mode?

That's one of the reasons.  Another big reason is that users are
unable to distinguish between the new behavior in 2.14.0 and the old
focus stealing prevention bugs being tracked in #149028 (which isn't
surprising -- most users are literally unable to distinguish between
the very different concepts of focusing and raising, and the different
focus-new-window behaviors is a far more subtle difference).  There's
possibly one more reason too: the combination of the fact that users
in general have a difficult time expressing themselves coherently, and
the fact that they were using the terminal to launch other apps.  ;)


Hope that helps,
Elijah