GTK and geometry

[Geoff Kuenning <geoff Lever CS UCLA EDU>]

If you continue to have difficulty please contact <listmaster@redhat.com>.
I've been using a nice gtk-based application (xlogmaster), but have
been quite thoroughly annoyed by the way it blows parsing of standard
X11 geometry strings.  So I found a few minutes today and went to fix
it.

To make a long investigation short, I discovered that there is a
fundamental problem in gtk itself.  There is no way for a gtk-based
program to tell the window manager whether a particular geometry
string was generated by a program (PPosition) or came directly from a
user request (UPosition).  Instead, gdk always assumes that geometry
strings are PPosition, and since window managers have the option of
ignoring PPosition, chaos results.

I took a quick look at fixing the problem, and it doesn't look too
hard, but it requires a change to the gdk interface.  Lacking time to
learn all about gtk/gdk in enough detail to make such a change right,
I'm reduced to sending mail to this list in hopes that someone more
knowledgeable will take the task on.  It's really not that hard, given
that you know what you're doing.

(In passing, it seems like gtk/gdk are also not too good at obeying
standard X resources.  While the rc files are nice for what they do,
it seems like a bit of backwards compatibility might be in order,
especially since the rc files don't even accept geometry specs...)
-- 
    Geoff Kuenning   geoff@cs.hmc.edu   http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/

It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it
is.  If you don't, it's its.  Then too, it's hers.  It isn't her's.  It
isn't our's either.  It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs.
                -- Oxford University Press, Edpress News