Re: desktop layout patch

[Michael Toomim <toomim OCF Berkeley EDU>]

Matthias Clasen wrote:
> This is not as general as the original proposal, since it doesn't
> cover vertical layouts with a fixed number of rows or horizontal
> layouts with a fixed number of columns, but these are kind of
> pathological anyway, since changing the number of desktops may lead
> to a complete reorganization of the layout there, e.g. for vertical
> layout, 3 rows, going from 6 to 7 desktops amounts to
>
> before:
> 1 3 5
> 2 4 6
>
> after:
> 1 4 7
> 2 5
> 3 6

I think there are arguments either way.  In gnome2, the pager controls
(horiz,rows) or (vert,cols), which is exactly that pathological setup.
An argument for this might be that the user wants to set the amount by
which workspaces are "squished", independent of how many workspaces she
wants.

(I happen to disagree with the UI that I just advocated; see this bug:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86888.  I'd feel more
comfortable if users specified workspaces in X,Y terms anyway, and would
rather there be a single point of entry to modify the number of rows and
columns.  It would certainly alleviate *this* mess.)

What you really want in the spec is for each module (wm, pager) to
supply only the information that it _controls_.  But I don't think that
we can easily make the decision here (on this list) of which data-sets
should be controlled by which module.  It brings into play some subtle
UI issues.

So the solution appears to be to make the spec flexible in this
regard... and allow the pager to specify *either* the rows or the
columns... which is the original proposal... so I guess I've come to
think that the original plan makes the most sense.  The special case
appears to be useful.