Re: [g-a-devel] Focus - AT vs. mouse/keyboard manipulation

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On 8/17/06, Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman sun com> wrote:
> Hmm, thinking sideways a bit...

Always welcome.  :-)

> is there some event we could explicitly fire (inside either atk-bridge
> or libgail -i.e. within the application's process space) which would

which process?  (The process that actually received the user
interaction event (which I called the "sender" in my previous email),
or the one that will be handling the user interaction event by opening
a window (the "receiver")?)

> have no real effect on the running app but which would result in the
> Xserver updating its user-time stamp?

Since I don't know which process you are referring to, here's some
guesses at what you're trying to get at:

Do you mean having the "receiver" ping the Xserver for a timestamp and
then updating its user-time property accordingly?  That wouldn't work,
as not only would it break the non-user-interaction cases, it has all
kinds of nasty race conditions.

Or are you thinking in terms of having the "sender" somehow update the
user-time of the process it is trying to send a message to?  Something
like that may be tenable, though we'd have to be careful about
how/when it got updated relative to receiving the do_process message.

> Seems to me that's what we want - to tell the application "hey, the user
> just interacted with you!".

No, not at all.  Messages and assumptions like this is exactly what
caused the huge focus-on-map security & other bug mess in the first
place.  We want to tell the application "hey, the user interacted with
you at time <x>" which is a world different than "hey, the user 'just'
interacted with you".  'just' carries no useful information with it
and results in all kinds of bugs.

Hope that helps,
Elijah