Re: Still need a hint for undecorated windows

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Friday 24 of June 2005 02:53, Carsten Haitzler wrote:
...
>
> personally i wish there were better ways to uniquely identify a particular
> app consistently - netwm's pid property, name, class, title and maybe netwm
> role combined make for quite a mess. i was thinking that in future maybe we
> can have some registration system where app devs get a unique ID for their
> app and can then use that. an md5sum of the binary would be nice but an
> upgrade would break things - or a recompile. but for now let's assume md5
> sum of the binary - and we place this as a property on a window... now we
> can be guaranteed to UNIQUELY identify THAT app. but we need something
> better than an md5 of the binary for the ID. it'd also be nice if this can
> be slid into xlib itself so that legacy apps suddenly "just work". any one
> got ideas?

 There is a way to identify a particular app and window from it uniquely. For 
app, just WM_CLASS, for a specific window WM_CLASS + WM_WINDOW_ROLE. The 
ICCCM is quite clear on these I think, and that's what KWin uses for 
identifying windows for its window-specific settings. Of course, a large 
number of apps get it wrong, either completely or just kind of wrong[*], and 
the first release of KWin with this feature didn't work that well because I 
had to add detection of the various ways of getting it wrong.

[*] From my understanding of the relevant parts of ICCCM, app Foo should 
generally set its WM_CLASS to "foo", "foo" (resname, resclass), or for a 
specific instance it should be "<whatever>", "foo", where <whatever> is 
specified using -name. WM_WINDOW_ROLE should uniquely identify any window 
within a specific app instance. The most usual ways of not getting it quite 
right include adding version to resclass, using resname instead of 
WM_WINDOW_ROLE or simply setting some rubbish there (Mozilla,OOo). But that's 
a fault of the apps, not of the spec.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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