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

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 5/26/05, Luke Schierer <lschiere users sf net> wrote:

> 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?

I did respond like that initially, and tried to gather info on what
was wrong and what needed to be fixed.  A few dozen emails later (and
when I thought we had found the real problem--a bug in one of the
implementations of the spec), you merely repeated the same assertion
that the spec itself is broken and needs to be tossed out for
something which isn't at all defined.  I'm willing to believe we need
to change things (we've made various adjustments to the spec since it
was added in order to address previous limitations), but claims that
its broken without details of why its broken and an incomplete new
solution is somewhat frustrating: since we supposedly missed some
cases in the first spec we came up with, and we don't know what those
cases are, how could we be expected to fix them with a new spec
without further detail about the problems or at least some details of
the proposed solution so we could compare how they worked?  Without
such details, at best we would merely cover the cases we have already
handled.  My reaction was likely overblown, but it was merely an
attempt to point out that if you want to make such claims then we
really do need details about why it is inadequate.
 
> Lubos Lunak seems to be confirming our reading that this *is*
> something that an application might be setting.  it thus *is*

Yeah, looks like I was confused...

> 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.

I totally agree with Lubos here.  Why should an application developer
have to worry about calling some function to state something about
focus for each and every new window it opens?  Many and perhaps even
most app developers just aren't going to do that.  It's a royal enough
pain to ask them to call a
this_is_an_unexpected_window_please_dont_focus_it() function for the
very few cases where it makes sense.

> 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.

Yeah, I could have handled that better.  Sorry about that.


Cheers,
Elijah