Re: Review: FULLSCREEN_MONITORS Hint

[Grant Patterson <grantp vmware com>]

I'm just using Nvidia TwinView and am relatively new to this stuff, so I don't 
have a firm grasp on what is possible without the new "RandR hotness". (Can 
monitors be different sizes? Can arrangements be non-linear, e.g. square of 4 or 
L shape? Can 2 monitors be skewed?)

Nevertheless, it seems like we might as well make the property something that 
can handle monitors anywhere on the framebuffer. This is easy enough to do with 
my new favorite method: specify a top-left and bottom-right monitor; the WM 
takes the bounding box of these and sets the window accordingly

I don't understand how width/height would be enough--given some horizontal 
arrangement of >2 monitors and width=2 monitors, how does the WM know where to 
place the window? VMware wants to change window configurations without leaving 
fullscreen (go from monitors {0, 1} to {1, 2}), so using the monitor we started 
fullscreen from won't cut it. Have I explained our desired functionality enough?

Regarding dealing with not getting what we want, we'd probably try the other 
configurations we wanted (there's some set of monitor configurations through 
which we cycle) and give up and revert to single-monitor fullscreen if 
everything fails. I really hope that doesn't happen, though; our intentions are 
for good, I promise!

Lubos Lunak wrote:
> On Thursday 29 of November 2007, Elijah Newren wrote:
> > On Nov 28, 2007 8:30 AM, Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz> wrote:
> > >  That'a very good point. I myself don't see how one could reasonably
> > > handle anything that doesn't look like current Xinerama setups, except by
> > > simply ignoring the screens that don't fit. I'm pretty upset by
> > > libXinerama on openSUSE10.3 with Intel now claiming that there are e.g.
> > > two screens 1400x1050+0+0 and 1024x768+0+0.
> > >
> > >  Which I guess means, unless somebody has some great idea, that we can
> > > ignore all this "RandR hotness".
> > So, given that, what do you think about using a hint that specifies
> > width & height (small integers specifying monitor counts instead of
> > pixel counts) rather than having a strict set of monitors on which the
> > window must lie?  Am I missing something?
>
>  That would be fine for the case I can easily imagine (video players), but I 
> guess this really depends on how exactly VMWare would want to use this hint. 
> And how it would cope with getting something different than it hoped for.