copied item going away when you close the window you copied from

[Darin Adler <darin eazel com>]

X has made good progress since the old days toward having easier to use copy
and paste for novice. We have the cut/copy/paste menu items as well as the
old parallel middle-click copying machinery. But we still have this problem
where the copied item goes away if the window you copied from goes away. I
hope I don't have to convince anyone here that's a problem, especially since
it's a limitation not shared by other platforms.

Basically, if you copy text from a window, then close that window, then
paste, the text is gone. This is also true within GTK. Once the widget goes
away, text copied from the widget is gone.

I'd like to know if anyone has the intention of addressing this problem in
GTK or maybe at the GNOME level and I figured I'd ask here. Should I write a
bugzilla.gnome.org bug report about this?

I heard from Pavel Cisler that there's some kind of solution for this
problem in Motif. Will fixing this require some kind of special daemon or
something? Is there a straightforward fix that won't require a lot of code
changes in application code?

    -- Darin