Re: _NET_WM_[GET_|TAKE_|REQUEST_]FOCUS & urgency

[Luke Schierer <lschiere users sf net>]

On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 09:17:45PM -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:
> On 5/25/05, Luke Schierer <lschiere users sf net> wrote:
> > On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 05:42:22PM -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:
> 
> > > Yes.  And we needed a concrete way of doing that across toolkits and
> > > applications (i.e. some implementation details about how to achieve
> > > this), so Lubos came up with _NET_WM_USER_TIME (and related stuff,
> > > like DEMANDS_ATTENTION) in the spec.  ;-)
> > 
> > Right. and Etan and Ethan found _NET_WM_USER_TIME to be insufficient,
> > hence "* While it may be valuable to specify or further specify how
> > this should be done, _NET_WM_USER_TIME in it's current overloaded state
> > does not seem to us to be a viable solution for this."  I anticipate
> > that you will respond that this statement is vague.  It does
> > continue, giving an idea for an alternate method.
> 
> Pardon me for being rude, but why exactly should I care that two
> people whom I don't know and have never heard of have found
> _NET_WM_USER_TIME to be insufficient?  Not a single example has been
> provided where it isn't enough to provide some kind of expected
> behavior, nor have any examples been shown where its use would
> preclude the ability to provide correct or desirable functionality. 

Perhaps you shouldn't.  Perhaps you shouldn't care that I'm here
complaining either.  Perhaps you should have responded like Rob Adams
did, and I would have almost immediately given it up as a bad job.

Or perhaps you should simply assume that I have a little bit of
sense, and that when I say you are going to call something
insufficient, that you can refrain from doing just that and put that
aspect of the thread on hold until more details are forth coming.  Or
perhaps tell me where its insufficient so that I can only bring it up
again when I have the details you want.

But both of those would require that you react with the possibility
in mind that something may need to be changed, perhaps there is some
issue that you didn't already know about, as you apparently already
knew that DEMANDS_ATTENTION needed work.  Is that too much for me to
ask?

> Off-handed/unsubstantied comments like this aren't helpful.
> 
> Now, it may well be that Etan and Ethan are X11 experts and geniuses;
> they are likely smarter than me.  But without some kind of
> substantiation it is impossible to differentiate their claims from the
> standard user who sees any old bug in a program they are using and
> shouts "This program has a crappy design; it is clear that we need to
> rewrite this from scratch" rather than providing information on
> tracking down and actually fixing bugs.  Saying it's
> insufficent/crappy/dumb or whatever is fine, as long as concrete
> reasons for its shortcomings are provided.
> 
> Also, as you noted, merely suggesting "something like a
> _NET_WM_[GET_|TAKE_|REQUEST_]FOCUS property" is pretty vague, but the
> problem is not so much that all the details aren't spelled out as that
> it doesn't even provide enough details for me to see how it could work
> as an alternate method.  It isn't at all clear to me that this
> proposal is sufficient (e.g. I don't see how it possibly could handle
> application launch cases), or even innocuous (it appears that it might
> be placing policy in apps instead of in the WM--something we've run
> into a big hurdle with in TAKE_ACTIVTY/MOUSE_ACTION).  At least a
> little more detail really would be necessary, but first you'd have to
> convince us that the current spec has some kind of problem or
> shortcoming or there's no way we'd want to dump it for something else
> that hopefully-does-the-same-thing.
> 
> > I absolutely understand not implementing something without
> > understanding a need for it.  We rather came to this
> > (DEMANDS_ATTENTION) from the *other* side having needed, looked for,
> > and found urgency before DEMANDS_ATTENTION was written.
> 
> I'm really still confused why you think you need to do anything with
> DEMANDS_ATTENTION.  But, considering the confusion, I think we
> *really* need to clear it up in the spec.  Maybe Lubos can comment
> here since he's the one that introduced the new state...

Lubos Lunak seems to be confirming our reading that this *is*
something that an application might be setting.  it thus *is*
something that Gaim needs to do something with, certainly in the case
where it is handled differently from urgency (which is true for now
at least in metacity as metacity doesn't handle it at all, and if the
two concepts are really not the same, then its something that we will
end up handling for other window managers as well, because someone
will implement them to do different things.  Or does it exist only
because you all think its too much work for an application to unset
urgency itself, so you felt the need to replace urgency so that the
WM could be unsetting it? Sorry, that's a somewhat sarcastic reply
because I've been told now that its too much work for an application
to transfer focus from one window to another.

Still, after your somewhat thoughtless paragraph that I replied to
separately, you have done a very good job of providing the questions
that I need to get answers for you for.

I'm really rather impressed, I was expecting more replies like I got
when I first posted this thread.  Hopefully you are finding our
interaction to have at least as much substance on my side, and I will
work to provide more substance.

luke

> 
> 
> Thanks for your time and thought on this issue.
> 
> Cheers,
> Elijah
>