Re: desktop layout patch

[Olivier Chapuis <olivier chapuis free fr>]

On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 09:17:08AM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Olivier Chapuis <olivier chapuis free fr> writes: 
> > Well GNOME2/KDE>=2 decides to use only multiple desktops, fine. But,
> > after that they want that multiple desktops share some properties
> > of large desktops and this leads to inconsistency in this spec.
> > IMHO, this is not acceptable.
> 
> Um, GNOME and KDE are pretty much the users of the spec... if you make
> it not work for us, what's the point?
> 

The ewmh spec (at least a large part) concerns interaction between a
wm, the desktop environment and clients. This threads is about
interaction between a pager and the wm (and maybe others clients
as a panel). So it seems to me that wm developers are concerned? 
Or maybe now the ewmh spec concerns only GNOME and KDE wm's?

> I don't think this list is the place to discuss whether GNOME and KDE
> made the right UI decisions. Neither one uses viewports by default
> anymore, though.
>

I do not discuss decision taken by GNOME and KDE. As I say the
decision is "fine" for me. What I contest is the "new" interpretation
that you give to multiple desktops with this desktop layer.
Moreover, it seems that Matthias and Greg are not so happy with
this new interpretation too
(I read http://www.phys.lsu.edu/~merchan/ws.html). But they do
not care?

But any way you decide and ...
My feeling is that KDE and GNOME decide to use only multiple
desktops because this is "better" for new users. After that
they have seen that some useful functionalities have been lost.
So, a new concept appear: "layered multiple desktops". You may
understand that "old" users are sceptical (in particular when
they have (maybe) to implement it). Unfortunately, it does not
seem that this new concept is as solid as it should be.

Regards, Olivier