Re: over-MUSTiness in the spec

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Tuesday 18 April 2006 16:00, Dan Winship wrote:
> Soeren Sandmann wrote:
> > The use of MUST means 'other applications, including but not limited
> > to the window manager, can rely on pagers sending a
> > _NET_CURRENT_DESKTOP message when they wish to switch virtual
> > desktop'.
>
> If a Client wants to know when a property changes, it needs to watch for
> PropertyNotify events on the root window. Watching for the ClientMessage
> is no good, because it has no way of knowing whether or not the WM will
> act on the request. (But the WM MUST update the _NET_CURRENT_DESKTOP
> property when the desktop changes.)

 I guess what Soeren meant was rather that MUST means that pagers will ask the 
WM to do the change and not try some hacks themselves.

>
> Lubos Lunak wrote:
> > That MUST means that the client should change the property by asking
> > the WM and not by fiddling with it itself.
>
> If we want to say that clients MUST NOT fiddle with the WM's properties,
> then we should say, at the top of the Root Window Properties section,
> that clients MUST NOT fiddle with the WM's properties. The current spec
> does not actually forbid that in most cases.

 Descriptions of the properties say things like "the property is set by the 
WM" or similar as far as I can see. Which ones lack anything like that?

>
> > most of those sentences now
> > read like if those required ways of changing things were just some
> > kind of convenience methods that one is not required to use.
>
> OK, but all of the messages I *didn't* change in my patch were already
> using "can". Should we change those to "MUST"?

 Then I suppose the right word should be SHOULD.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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