Re: resizing with gravity

[Sasha Vasko <sasha aftercode net>]

Dan Winship wrote:

> Yes, that's why I suggested the text about "Clients SHOULD always
> include x and y in this case", because then it works regardless of how
> the WM behaves. IOW, we declare the disputed functionality to be
> deprecated and essentially undefined, since as you note, it is unlikely
> that we will ever reach a state where all WMs implement it the same.


That is a HORRIBLE!!! idea. Applications should never ever try to fiddle 
with its position after initial placement. Position of the window on 
screen is entirely responcibility of the window manager. There is no 
reliable way for clients to ever figure out how exactly configure 
requests are handled by window managers as window managers may employ 
all kinds of custom placement policies, such as tiling, tabbing, avoid 
cover, screen area restrictions and so forth.

In fact I suggest that we explicitely state the opposite: "Clients MUST 
NEVER EVER include x and y in ConfigureRequests" Although most smart and 
responsibly implemented clients already know that, and those who suffer 
from delusion of grandeur, will always ignore such statements anyways, 
so really there is no point in amending specs.

Clients should only be able to change size of the top level windows and 
then let window managers reposition them in accordance to its policies. 
Which is were gravity comes into play ( from WM_NORMAL_HINTS ). And 
again, this gravity should be choosen by clients based on user request 
of initial geometry, and should not be mangled by the client itself.

Simple example: a terminal application.
You start it like so: xterm -geometry 100x25-0-0

Terminal then gets placed at the bottom-right corner of the screen. Now 
what would happen if user decided to change font size in it ? Do you 
really want xterm to try and calculate what its x and y should be for 
ConfigureRequest??? I don't. And I doubt that xterm developers differ 
with me on that one.

You may want to go back in time (around 2000/2001) and re-read ML 
archives on this particular topic.

Regards
Sasha Vasko