Re: pseudo transparency

[Sasha Vasko <sasha aftercode net>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Hi,
>
> It's probably relevant here that the current pseudo-transparency bad
> hacks can go away as soon as Keith implements actual transparent
> windows.
>
> I'd kind of hate to formalize the current appalling broken hacks, but
> at the same time replacing them with a new mildly-less-broken _NET
> mechanism seems pointless - why break a working convention when we
> hope to just get rid of the whole mess in the end?


If Keith implements true transparency, that will be really great, but it 
will not solve the problem at hands. Idea is that you don't want to use 
true transparency in most cases, since too much background noise will 
make reading term's text for example almost impossible. Quite often what 
is desired is exactly the pseudo-transparency. And to achieve 
pseudotransparency you'll always need root background. So unless X 
implements functionality for getting background pixmap of the window ( 
much missing one indeed )  - there will always be a need for root 
background sharing algorithm.


> Maybe it makes sense to just document the current convention in some
> detail, and put the resulting document on freedesktop.org, but don't
> put it in the WM spec. (After all, this convention can be used by many
> apps that are not the window manager.)


Current convention sucks, and is nothing but a cruel hack to temporarily 
resolve the problem, that has grown out of proportion.


> Havoc


Sasha.