Re: NET_WM_PID is broken (was: NET_WM_PID and client leader)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Mathias Hasselmann <mathias hasselmann gmx de> writes:
> On 2 Aug 2001, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> > Is it required to set _NET_WM_PID on all toplevels, or only the client
> > leader window? What are people doing now?
> 
> 	Apropos _NET_WM_PID: This hint is broken since the current spec
> since doesn't distinguish between local and remote clients. Imagine what
> happens if your X server, session manager has the process id 4311 and your
> window manager manages a client coming from another machine unfortunatly
> having _NET_WM_PID set to 4311 (since the client's process id on the
> remote machine is 4311). In the case that your window manager implements
> the _NET_WM_PING protocol and the remote client stops processing
> _NET_WM_PING client messages your X session will die.
> 
> 
> 	To get arround this problem we could force all _NET_WM clients to
> set the WM_MACHINE_NAME hint in a well defined manner. Or we would have to
> introduce yet another _NET_WM hint describing the client's host. Third
> solution: We could forbid remote clients to set the _NET_WM_PID hint.
> 

You are supposed to use _NET_WM_PID in conjunction with
WM_MACHINE_NAME, see the paragraph at the end of "Implementation
notes." I think this is a quality-of-implementation issue.

Havoc