Re: Discontinuation of GNOME Clipboard Manager

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

On Fri, 2004-04-02 at 03:08, PageStream Support wrote:

> > It's not nice and even more nor easy to create such a page without
> > creating huge amounts of havoc and anger. I am, for sure, not a
> > candidate for it. However, most of the clipboard related problems are
> > indeed, problems in the applications.
>
> Forgive the diversion, but as an application developer who is trying to 
> support the clipboard/drag drop (and more than just text), the 
> documentation is difficult at best. Seems just creating better 
> docs/"standards" might help this situation out.
>
> My two personal pet peeves (and if someone has answers, by all means 
> enlighten me!) are what formats should/recommended be made available and 
> how to tell what formats an application is making available. I know I can 
> ask for something and it will tell me if it is available, but how does one 
> find out what the list is that is being made available to the clipboard? 
> Would help in #1 if I knew what is being put to the clipboard in existing 
> applications without dissecting piles of code.

And those questions are the problem that I am feeling too. Such
documentation is very hard to find and the method for programming
clipboard situations (in GNOME) is not easy at all.

I am not really blaming the application developers. I am actually
blaming the fact that the mechanism is dull and stupid from the start.
The GNOME API is just a wrapper around a very very difficult mechanism.

* For proper clipboard handling with multiple formats your application
has to convert it's format all by itself, some helping libraries should
be provided for this.

* Your application needs to handle this clipboard is some wieerd to
understand event-handling in which you first claim ownership, then catch
the event "handle the request for a clipboard-question of another
application". In that request you have to find out (in a difficult way
to understand in my humble opinion) what format the requester wants and
then convert your format to that format and set the selection-data to
that.

It would be far more easy if the applications could delegate all that to
the clipboard mechanism. For example; the applications should then not
have to handle events but would just have to "set" the clipboard. And
they could use shared memory area's or something like that (or
whatever). The clipboard mechanism would then only be responsible for
the returning of that data and handle events like 'a new clipboard is
set'. Even writing a stupid file in the home-directory of the current
user and make the applications write, read -and lock it would be a lot
more faster than the current implementation I think.

-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
work: Philip dot VanHoof at cronos dot be
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org