Re: _NET_WM_USER_TIME reconsidered

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On 9/4/06, Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz> wrote:
> On Monday 04 September 2006 05:17, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> >   _NET_WM_USER_TIME_WINDOW WINDOW/32
>
>  That feels overly specific. What would be wrong with setting that e.g. on
> the group leader?

So all windows of a window group would set their _NET_WM_USER_TIME
property on the same window, making that some kind of array property?

> > PS I should not forget to mention that Owen already pointed out this
> > problem and the proposed solution when _NET_WM_USER_TIME was
> > discussed in 2003:
> >
> > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-spec-list/2003-May/msg00047.html
>
> "I'm slightly bothered by the idea that the window manager would et
> woken up (to handle the PropertyChangeNotify) on every keypress and
> button press. I don't really expect it to be a problem in practice,
> however."

I don't think having the WM being woken up on every keypress is all
that big of a problem.  What I'm worried about is having lots of other
apps woken up on every keypress.  We have a library called libwnck
that is seeing strongly increased usage (both directly and through
e.g. python language bindings).  libwnck can be used to build
full-blown pager-like applications, but is also useful for many other
cases.  Since libwnck watches toplevel windows to get its job done
(e.g. needs to know hidden state changes, icon changes, name changes,
etc.) every process using this library will be woken up on every
keypress.  The number of context switches is simply going to increase
over time as more and more apps use this library or others like it.

Elijah