Re: Discontinuation of GNOME Clipboard Manager

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 15:02, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 13:38, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > [snip]
> > I would be interested in your opinion of the clipboard situation if we
> > ignore clipboard history. I don't personally think that a clipboard
> > history is worth worrying about very much.
>
> The major issues at this moment probably are that
>
> a) The clipboard implementation of X is not scalable enough to transfer
> larger Clipboard data from one application to another. Look at the
> Mozilla bug (about the 4000 bytes). It's probably both an issue in
> Mozilla and an issue caused by the fact that actually..the mechanism is
> just not suitable to copy-and-paste huge amounts of data. (And by huge I
> mean: Up to 60 mb of data, why not?)

So this is a performance issue? I have noticed that copy and paste of
huge amounts of data is unusable in gnumeric too, though some visual
feedback might help.

Is there _any_ system on which this works? Maybe copying vast amounts of
data is just fundamentally slow? I remember having exactly the same
problems on Windows.

> b) When an application owning the clipboard shuts down, no application
> cares about the clipboard content it is/was owning. It basically means
> that the clipboard is lost with the application-instance. It's very hard
> or maybe impossible to know when the application currently owning the
> clipboard is going to be shut down (I have not tried this, yet).

But a simple clipboard daemon (such as Hongli's) seems to deal with this
quite well, in my opinion, even if it isn't a technically perfect
solution. 

> c) Not much applications agree upon each other clipboard formats (the
> TARGETS Atom). Some very common formats should be agreed upon. For
> example, every application should at least set a "TEXT" and a
> "text/html" target.

I thought that freedesktop.org was dealing with this. For instance:
http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/UTF8_STRING/

I certainly think that freedesktop.org is the place for this. They have
already greatly improved the copy/paste situation.

> For example: This has been fixed but even the formatting of the data
> itself was not in sync between some applications. Some time ago
> OpenOffice.Org used UTF-8 and Mozilla UTF-16 for the formatting (I can
> be wrong here, I don't remember it very well). It rendered
> copy-and-pasting text with layout between both applications impossible.

I guess it would be worthwhile for someone to set up a project/web-page
with a list of guilty applications, and the specific errors in their
clipboard formats, in terms of open standards. That might be a first
step to getting these data-format problems fixed. After all, they sound
like application problems rather than platform problems.

[snip]

> d) It is impossible to know when a change of the clipboard-ownership has
> happened. You can only know when you loose clipboard ownership. This
> makes it very difficult to ever create a Clipboard Manager.

What problems does this cause in real life, for users, when using a
simple clipboard daemon, such as hongli's?
 
-- 
Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc murrayc com