Re: Are their public standards for "window manager compatability"?

[Tom Tromey <tromey cygnus com>]

Paul> On the WM list, I asked the experts about gnome compatability
Paul> and they reacted with, well, dismay.  Several indicated they had
Paul> made an effort to find out what Gnome would require and they
Paul> were not able to do so.

Paul> If I have this wrong, please point me to the place where the
Paul> standards are described and I'll make sure they get forwarded to
Paul> the WindowMaker crew.

As I understand it, there are two things that will make any given WM
work well with Gnome:

1. It must implement the extended wm hints.  I don't know the precise
details of this.  I know that various proposals have been floated.
They all looked pretty good to me.  The last I heard was that we were
going to use the MWM hints plus whatever the icewm maintainer is
implementing (as his changes seemed all of necessary, sufficient, and
clean) -- but I doubt this is definitive.

2. The wm must implement session management.  The reference for this
is the X Session Management Protocol.  I got this document from
ftp.x.org.  There are at least 2 different session managers you can
use to test this stuff (xsm which comes with X, and gnome-session
which is in gnome-core).


#2 is what is preventing me from using a Gnome session as my standard
setup.  The icewm maintainer has been working on this though; a switch
to icewm is likely in my near future.

I'm happy to help any wm maintainer with questions about X session
management.  Generally speaking I doubt any help will really be
required, because the docs are fairly clear.  Still, feel free to give
out my name and email address if you think it will help -- I'm very
interested in getting this to happen.

Tom