Re: desktop layout patch

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Olivier Chapuis <olivier chapuis free fr> writes:
> 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?

The purpose of the spec is to allow people to use alternative WM's
with desktop environments, with GNOME and KDE being the most
popular. Also to just have nice well-specified interfaces between
desktop environment components and the WM.

My point was just that if we don't add something like this to the
spec, then both GNOME and KDE will have a custom extension just like
this (I think KDE already does). And it seems kind of dumb to have two
identical custom extensions that don't interoperate.

> Unfortunately, it does not seem that this new concept is as solid as
> it should be.

I just don't really understand the problem. The pager displays
desktops. It therefore has to display them with some geometric
relation. This spec addition tells the WM how they are displayed, the
WM can use that information as it sees fit, including ignoring it
totally.

Havoc