Re: Removing wm/pager interaction

[John Harper <john dcs warwick ac uk>]

Michael Rogers writes:
|As the recent discussion about handling multiple desktops in AfterStep 
|revealed, wm/pager interaction is very hard to get right without restricting 
|any existing window managers. As far as I know, the Gnome pager and its 
|replacements, the tasklist and desk guide, are the only tools which require 
|the wm/pager interaction parts of the spec. In my opinion these standalone 
|tools are causing more trouble than they are worth, since they are holding 
|back the important goal of wm independence.

I like the simplicity of your draft, but I think it just makes the
problem worse. If you remove the pager hints it won't stop people using
them (or something similar). So what might happen then is that we'll
have a standard for a few trivial interactions, plus maybe a few ad hoc
standards for pager interactions. This doesn't seem much better than
what we had before..

IMHO it would be better to at least _have_ a standard for this, even if
the standard is slightly restrictive. There is nothing forcing wm's to
implement this standard, and there is nothing stopping them from
implementing their own pager with all the functionality that that
window manager can support

(e.g. sawfish supports windows being on any arbitrary set of
workspaces, yet it can't expose this information through the pager
spec. But I'd rather have it that way than have to reimplement yet
another desktop pager)

Maybe it would be easier to just make it clear in the spec that window
managers are free to implement any subset of the spec that they choose
(isn't this what the _NET_SUPPORTED_HINTS property is for?)

	John