Re: Still need a hint for undecorated windows

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Thursday 23 of June 2005 18:36, Philipp Lohmann - Sun Germany - ham02 - 
Hamburg wrote:
> Sasha Vasko wrote:
> > Philipp Lohmann - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg wrote:
> > Window manager does not implement an idea of its own. it simply provides
>
> Of course it does. Else there would be only one window manager, not a
> kwin, metacity and and an fvwm.

 Hmm, I guess you missed one or two more WMs ;)  ... one or two hundred, that 
is.

> > But what makes it different from apps doing it on their own is :
> > 1) Consistency - all windows are treated consistently throughtout the
> > desktop, unless user (not an app developer!) desires otherwise.
>
> And why not an application developer ? If a window manager could
> actually decide what a window should look like there would not be a need
> for hints at all. OF COURSE the application developer has to have a say
> in UI.

 Of course hints are needed. They describe the window and tell the WM things 
it cannot otherwise decide or know (say, icon, caption, preferred size). 
However decorations is something the WM knows and decides.

> > If you really want to try yourself at window manager's interface design
> > - write a window manager, not an app.
> >
> > Window manager's don't try to impose ideas about how contents of a
> > window should be rendered, right? So why would an application try to
> > impose its ideas on window manager ?
>
> I'd say by requiring an application to change its UI depending on
> whether the WM actually honors a request indeed seems to indicate a WM
> that imposes the contents of the application window.

 Decorations, even if hacked in by the app itself, hardly qualifies as 
contents of a window.

> Let's not make this into a flamewar. I guess i will not convince you
> anyway. But, please, have a little place in your heart for us
> application developers that occasionally actually need the window
> manager to do what they need.

 I yet to have actually see somebody saying a single reason why this is really 
needed. Why should any app be able to forcibly control whether it should or 
should not have decorations? Even the xmms/gkrellm examples are rather 
non-convincing - if I decide I don't want any decorations for gkrellm I can 
simply turn them off in KWin, and the same for xmms. And I can control xmms' 
window-related functionality directly using KWin anyway, just with Alt+F3, so 
if I decide I don't want decorations for it, I don't need xmms drawing 
another set for me (which I moreover cannot get rid of, unlike KWin's). So 
what good should this hint be for?

> In the end what good is a window manager 
> without applications ?

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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