Re: Application-controlled window dragging

[Nathaniel Smith <njs pobox com>]

On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 04:13:41PM -0700, Christian Hammond wrote:
>    The piece of code I'm working on now is an experiment at the moment, but
>    it will be part of a full-blown feature we're working on, one which I'm
>    sure will be very popular. I can't talk about the feature in detail
>    (unless either of you want to sign an NDA, which I can probably arrange),
>    as it hasn't been announced yet, but not having this support will have a
>    serious impact on this feature's usability.

I appreciate these issues, but I also hope you realize there are some
fundamental difficulties with convincing a free standards group to
mandate some behavior in N different window manager projects, just on
your word that it will allow one proprietary app to have a totally
cool feature that is best implemented and set in stone in this way
that I came up with and no-one has reviewed, trust me.

I mean, these might be all true... but I'm not sure how, as
hopefully-responsible engineers, we can just accept them without
checking for ourselves, or convince projects that they should bother
implementing/maintaining this feature with no more to go on than your
word.  Do you have any ideas?

If the problem is just that it needs to remain a secret for a while
longer, you may have more luck adding support for a custom (not
_NET_WM_*) extension to a few important window managers, convincing
their maintainers to take the patch, and then worry about pushing it
up into EWMH once the feature is out and there is some real-world
experience with it.

(Also, umm... is "lack of wobbly windows" really a "serious impact"?
Though I guess you can't really explain why things would affect
usability, either.)

-- Nathaniel

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