Re: RFC: FULLSCREEN_MONITORS property

[Philip Langdale <philipl overt org>]

Elijah Newren wrote:
> 
> David's patch does that, if I read correctly in my quick scanning of
> it.  My question is: why is this useful?  Would a simpler
> fullscreen-across-all-monitors hint be sufficient?

No. The feature we're trying to enable allows you dedicate subsets
of the available monitors to the VM - anything from 1 head to
all heads and any strictly contiguous subsets (so if you have
three monitors in a row, we won't let you choose the two outside
ones but any other combination is acceptable).

Yes, there is an argument that this is something of a niche requirement,
although I do believe it has applicability for other applications, but
the key factor is that it is currently *impossible* to implement this
behaviour if the window manager is being uncooperative (short of
override-redirect - which causes so many other problems). There is literally
no combination of hints that will convince metacity to allow this to happen.
Although I think it's possible with most other window managers, when the
broken case is so ubiquitous, you can't ignore it. So, it seems that the
only way to guarantee it to be possible is to clearly define the behaviour
in the spec so that window managers can know how to support it.

--phil