WM standards

[Carlos Pereira <carlos pehoe civil ist utl pt>]

I have been running my app with gtk1.2.10 on both 
i386 and PPC architectures, everything is working 
great, except a few glitches:

1) gdk_window_set_decorations is not recognized
by GNOME (sawfish) and twm, this on PPC Yellow Dog
2.2, which in turn is based on Red Hat 7.2.
In KDE, gdk_window_set_decorations is recognized,
but only if the window is unmaped (with the inevitable
and annoying flashing effects), for example:

gtk_widget_hide (window);
gdk_window_set_decorations (window->window, FALSE);
gtk_widget_show (window);

In my old Intel Red Hat 5.2 gdk_window_set_decorations
is also recognized only when unmaping the window first.

This is important in scientific, engineering applications
CAD/CAM and other 3D apps, to get a full screen view
of some image (typically OpenGL images as in my case)

These task bars in Gnome and KDE are also a serious
drawback for this, unless there is a simple way to
hide/show them COMPLETELY (in both Gnome and KDE is
easy to have a minimal bar, just a few pixels, but
for example to make a picture of the full image that
is not enough, the task bar should be 100% hidden, 
not just 99%)

2) The environment variable BROWSER, which was defined
on Red Hat 5.2 is gone in 7.2, at least on Yellow Dog 2.2.
I used this to launch a browser pointing to the web pages
containing updated Help information, when users choose Help 
Remote instead of the local Help options that I also provide.

Is there an elegant way of dealing with this?

3) WINDOWID is defined in Gnome and twm, but not in KDE,
and anyway it doesn't work in Gnome, this in Yellow Dog 2.2,
although with the same gtk version WINDOWID works just fine
on my older Intel Red Hat 5.2. I will try later with
Window Maker, Enlightenment, etc...

I use this as a convenient way to raise/lower the 
window used to launch my app, to check log messages 
written to stdout (and in log files as well). This is 
quite convenient in engineering apps, where lots of 
usefull info might be checked easily this way.

I hope the freedesktop project (thanks Havoc) will
succed, and one day, not too far away, we might have
some WM standards, that every WM around feel compeled
to apply, but I am affraid we still have a loong way
before we reach that.

Carlos