Re: _NET_WM_USER_TIME reconsidered

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Monday 04 September 2006 17:18, Elijah Newren wrote:
> 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?

 No, I meant just one property for the whole group (I handle user activity 
basically per window group in KWin, it doesn't seem to make sense to go 
lower). However thinking of it now I'm not sure if it wouldn't cause some 
trouble in cases such as one process showing a dialog for a window from 
another process (although my guess would be that there shouldn't be any in 
practice).

> 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.

 Isn't this more of a problem in libwnck then? I don't think that apps other 
than desktop components (panel, WM,...) should watch all toplevels, why? Our 
KWinModule, which is probably the equivalent, does that only when needed.

 But generally no have strict objections to the change. I'd just like to make 
it a bit more generic in case there'll more similar cases in the future 
(i.e., as I said, _NET_WM_USER_TIME_WINDOW feels overly specific).

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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