Re: Use-positions-properly-dammit hint

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Friday 11 August 2006 02:20, Rob Adams wrote:
> Are there many EWMH clients that are doing this sort of abuse?

 You mean, besides the Qt and Gtk ones :) ? Ok, I actually don't if it's 
really the toolkit in the case of Gtk apps, but Qt has to work with all weird 
kinds of systems and WMs and simply does it the easy way by always using 
PPosition|USPosition. If I don't give them a reasonable way of detecting when 
they can do it properly, I'm not sure they will.

> If 
> mostly the abusers are those that don't support EWMH, then it's not
> likely to help much.  Otherwise, clients could simply detect EWMH
> support by checking for the existence of a supported hint at all, and
> follow those guidelines.

 I think, with the current state of things of clients doing workarounds for WM 
workarounds for broken clients, that it's simpler to have a clear start. 
Using EWMH=good, not-EWMH=bad might be a quite good heuristic, but then are 
really all WMs with at least some EWMH hints good, with the spec having been 
around for so long? I admit it is weird to have a flag for 
I-am-doing-it-properly, but then we can't have a flag for I-suck I'm afraid.

 Additionally there's the thing about e.g. dialog placement, with currently 
all apps explicitly placing their dialogs, as otherwise they'd often get 
normal window placement for them, which is undesired. Well, or at least app 
writers think so, given that they always do it. The WM may do better here, 
but without a flag it can't know that the dialog has just default position 
specified and the client can't know it'll get default position even without 
explicitly specifying it.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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