Drag and drop protocol in Gtk?

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel nuclecu unam mx>]

Hello guys,

   I took a quick look at the comparission of the Xdnd and Xde drag
and drop protocols (follow the link at http://www.gnome.org/devel/arch/dnd.html)
and I am not quite sure that the current Xde protocol provides any
real advantage over the Xdnd protocol.

   From the gnome web page:

> The differences between Xde and Xdnd are: 
> 
> 	  Better handling of copy/move/link operations (i.e. you can
>         know what type you are copying/moving/linking) 
>
> 	  Fuller ICCCM compliance 
> 
> 	  Integrates the "drop is finished" notification into the
>         protocol instead of using the X selection protocol, reducing overhead
> 	  and allowing the user greater flexibility for data transfer. 

Point (1) is apparently addressed by the Xdnd protocol in a nice way
(http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~jafl/xdnd/dragging_files.html).

The reason for Point (2) is not very well documented, but as far as I
can see (from the discussion Owen and Elliot had), using the X
selection code for achieving this goal seems to be better, and thus it
should be more ICCCM compliant :-)

Point (3) about the overhead of the drag and drop protocol:  I do not
really think that this extra "overhead" [1] is worth being
incompatible with Qt/KDE and the JX protocol.  

I am worried about the DND state on Gtk as apparently nobody has
done any extensive testing on it and the 1.0 release date is
approaching.  I would like to see Gtk 1.0 ship with the Xdnd protocol
instead of the currently incompatible Xde protocol.

miguel.