Re: _NET_SHOWING_DESKTOP, per workspace vs. global

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Sunday 08 of August 2004 05:13, Elijah Newren wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The wording of the EWMH spec sort of implies that _NET_SHOWING_DESKTOP is
> a global quantity, but a per-workspace quantity seems more natural.  We
> want to switch to such a usage in Metacity and Havoc suggested I email the
> list about it.
>
> Basically, we have a patch that interprets _NET_SHOWING_DESKTOP as a
> per-workspace quantity and keeps track internally of which workspaces
> have it set.  When the user switches workspaces, Metacity toggles
> _NET_SHOWING_DESKTOP if the showing state is different on one workspace
> than the other.

 In KDE the show desktop button affects only the current virtual desktop and 
switching it simply unsets the show desktop state (well it would if there 
wasn't a bug).

>
> Havoc did suggest that perhaps having _NET_SHOWING_DESKTOP be an array
> would be a little cleaner.  That makes sense to me, but I'm lazy.

 AFAIK there are implementations which check exact size of properties and bail 
out if it doesn't match, so I'm afraid this can't be done, and extending 
properties needs to be done by replacing them with new ones :(. Too bad the 
spec lacks some comment saying that additional data should be ignored if 
there's any.

> Anyway, see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=142198 for the
> details.

 I have a different problem with this property. There are 3 things that can 
happen if you have the show desktop state turned on, and you start new 
application. They are very well described at 
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-usability&m=108274247022218&w=2 . No matter what 
you choose, somebody complains :(. KDE used to do 2), now it does 3), GNOME 
seems to do 1). And as you can see in the mail, there's always somebody who 
doesn't like that. Moreover as I read the vague description in the spec, 3) 
is actually not fully compliant with it.

 Do you have perhaps have something similar in your bugzilla or somewhere? I 
really don't know what to do with this damn button :(.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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