Re: Discontinuation of GNOME Clipboard Manager

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 14:11, Mitterer, Christoph Anton wrote:

> |Because I feel that the solution is not to create a Clipboard Managing
> |application, but to fix the problem deep into the system itself, both me
> |and Andrew Lau, the maintainer of the Debian package, have decided to
> |remove GNOME Clipboard Manager from the list of Debian packages.
>
> I share your point of view that clipboard managing (and drag&drop) is
> still a big problem on Linux/Unix systems and a  (proper) standard is
> required. But as long as there isn't a standard a manager like your
> GCM ist better than nothing.
>
> I'm very sad about the decision to remove GCM from Debian.

You might have a point that it's indeed a usefull temporary fix for a
lot people. But if I keep supporting the wrong fix, people will not be
tampered enough to fight the actual problem.

GNOME Clipboard Manager will make sure that some broken stuff gets
fixed, but will not fix everything. It tends to make people belive that
it will be a solution for their clipboard problem, but often it's not.

It could, however, be used as a hybrid of a new mechanism and the old
ICCCM standard. I see the future of gcm more as such a hybrid
application than as 'the' application responsible for the main clipboard
activities. 

If such a standard ever gets build and will work and be set as the
default of all major desktop-types on linux (being KDE, GNOME,
WindowMaker, Enlightenment, whateverment, and whoeverbuilditment), then
GNOME Clipboard Manager could be the application that will both talk the
old protocol, for older X applications, and the new protocol, for newer
applications. Making it possible to share clipboards by managing the old
clipboard-type.


It's a possibility, yes. But I am not planning to waste my time before
'a' standard is proposed by freedesktop.org. I think they are the only
ones who can propose a standard that will be adopted by most of not all
Linux desktop developers. I would hate to see yet another incompatible
protocol.

My view about 'those other' projects (like KDE) is pretty simple: Lets
not fight each other by making stuff incompatible, lets fight each other
by creating betting stuff.. using the standards that we, at some point,
all agreed to use. And lets use freedesktop.org as the organisation
telling us what those standards are. Competition is okay .. but not by
creating a standard for every fucking thing that we implemented.
Therefor I fear that projects like the bonobo-clipboard are doomed to
fail (not that I dislike the idea, I do like it..actually).


> Regards,
> cam.
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-- 
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