Re: WM Extended Spec Summary, 6/21/99

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Matthias Ettrich wrote:
> 
> So what is it application needs to communicate with the WM? It's showing
> windows,  hiding windows, moving windows to other desktops, iconifying windows
> etc. All is done currently with a few simply, well defined X-calls. So there's
> no need to put an additional burden on WM developers.
> 
> It's trivial to add a wrapping application that provides an interface to access
> these properties, thus making the wm scriptable. It's even more trivial to put
> these functions in a shared library.
> 

This makes sense. Let's say "no required CORBA until we have something the
X hints won't work for." It seems to me that it would make it too hard to
get a consensus between all the people on this list. Please, everyone
consider this as well as their own technical perspective.

However, if we write a CORBA wrapper lib for the hints, that would be
nice, and since it's Xlib we can even share it between the two desktops.
We should also share the IDL for this; and if a WM wants to implement the
interface directly (say, for efficiency), or if E wants to implement the
interface in terms of the eesh thingy in addition to via the hints, then
that's also a possibility individual WM authors can exploit.

So I think there's some value in having an IDL spec eventually, even if it
duplicates lots of things from the hints spec.

But I'm all in favor of focusing on the hints for now, to get something
working in the short term.

Havoc