Re: Removing wm/pager interaction

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"Michael Rogers" <mrogers@cs.ucl.ac.uk> writes: 
> Are there any programs other than the Gnome pager, tasklist and desk guide 
> which use these hints? Those applets are part of the core Gnome packages, so 
> they could easily be removed from the next major release. (IIRC, panel version 
> 1.1 broke v1.0 applets without causing any major problems, because all the 
> affected code was in the core packages, so it was possible to keep it 
> synchronised.)
>

I don't think we want to go that route; the pager and tasklist belong
in the panel, there isn't anywhere else sensible to put them (why
should they be floating around taking up desktop space?).
 
> If we're going to have a standard, it has to be one that makes sense. The 
> current draft standard (1.9e) has some serious problems when it comes to 
> creating, deleting and naming desktops.
>

It would be good to fix these. We need the pager hints to get an
integrated desktop.
 
> WM idiosyncrasies like this one will lead to the information provided by the 
> pager being inconsistent with the information provided by the wm. (Another 
> example is that the Gnome deskguide uses click-to-focus, while my wm uses 
> focus-follows-pointer.) That might be a fair compromise for those users who 
> are aware of the fact that their window manager and their pager are two 
> separate programs which share a limited amount of information, but I imagine 
> inconsistencies like this would frustrate most users, who don't need or want 
> to know how their desktop environment works.
>

I think the naive users will get a set of defaults that work
(certainly click-to-focus, for example). Ideally the option to select
the more confusing settings will be semi-hidden.
 
> This is the problem that the spec is meant to solve, and ironically the 
> universal pager, the tool that was supposed to enable window manager 
> independence for Gnome, seems to be the biggest stumbling block.
> 

>From our point of view, we need a pager in the panel. There are two
ways to get that: WM spec, or require a specific window manager.

We could also be window manager independent by not providing any
functionality, and letting the window manager do all the desktop
tasks, but in this case we'd have to anoint the official window
manager that we maintained, and users who wanted a different window
manager would essentially have to drop all the GNOME
features. i.e. we'd just be moving GNOME into the window manager, and
"window manager independent" wouldn't mean anything at that point.

The root of the issue is that there are lots of chunks of
functionality, and there's lots of variation in what a WM provides. If
your window manager has a dock/panel thing, then it probably doesn't
make any sense to run the GNOME one also. There's also file managers,
pagers, etc., which may be in GNOME and may be in the window manager.

There's no particular a priori reason why each functionality chunk
should be in one place or another. If we had had a WM that presented
the same integrated look and feel you get from the GNOME stuff, we
would almost certainly have used it. However so far no WM has even
wanted to link libgtk, so it's impossible to get nice integration with
GTK apps, write applets with the GNOME libs, etc. This means as a
practical matter that some of the functionality has to be outside the
WM.

Ideally, users can mix-and-match functionality chunks from different
sources. To me that's the goal of the WM spec, to let the various
pieces be modular. Some users will care more about specific WM
features than the fact that our pager matches our CD player app.

If someone likes the WM pager better, they can turn off the GNOME one,
similarly the GNOME panel can be removed.

But, none of the current WM's have a native pager/tasklist that's
suitable for the GNOME default, at least I haven't seen it. So we need
to provide a panel, pager, task list, file manager, control panel,
etc. that have integrated look-and-feel. Given that, the only way to
be window manager independent is this spec.

Havoc