Re: Window History Placement

[Benjamin Kahn <xkahn ximian com>]

Hi Matthias,

On Thu, 2003-01-09 at 18:23, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> So this is the "WM saves" strategy, which has the advantage that the WM
> controls what gets saved, but doesn't allow to keep history across WM
> changes (unless we standardize file formats and locations...). This is
> probably an acceptable price to pay for getting this to work reliably
> for all applications. 

	Yes.  I thought about trying to standardize the file format and
location when I started out, but decided against it for the moment.  The
file format I'm using is quite simple however, and could easily be moved
to a common location.  (Currently I'm storing it in
.metacity/window-history)

> Will I still be able to do xterm -geometry 90x60, or will this come up
> with the geometry stored under XTerm/xterm//99 ? Granted, new
> applications could be made clever enough to set an empty
> _NET_WM_GEOMETRY_SAVE_ID if cmdline args are present, but what about
> legacy apps ? And setting an empty save id has the effect of not storing
> the geometry at all. Is there a way to have a cmdline-specified geometry
> stored, or is that not a relevant use case ? One idea would be to change
> or remove the save id after mapping the window. How does your
> implementation behave in that case ? Should the behaviour in that case
> be specified ?

	Although I didn't specify those cases, my implementation covers them. 
Windows which request a geometry or exact screen placement are given
that size and position.  (As a side implementation detail, my patch only
saves window information once the window has been moved once.  This
means that windows placed exactly from command line arguments won't be
stored in the history unless the user moves them later.  This could
either be a feature or a bug of my patch.)

	If the save id is set after the window is mapped, I forget the history
information I have stored for the window already and immediately save
that window's history under the new id.

> Does this interfere in any way with SM ?

	No.  Window history is not consulted at all during session restore, or
session saving.

> Small nitpick: Since you're saving more than just geometry, the property
> would better be named _NET_WM_SAVE_ID.

	Sounds reasonable.