Re: struts, workareas and xinerama

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Monday 21 of January 2008, Dana Jansens wrote:
> On Jun 13, 2007 8:52 AM, Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> wrote:
> > Dana Jansens wrote:
> > > This has the property of being backwards compatible with previous
> > > versions of the specification.  An application can read only the first
> > > n (number of desktops) dimensions and ignore the remainder, and it
> > > will not end up putting icons in nowhereland.
> >
> > It's probably not backward compatible; I know I've often written code
> > that verifies the exact property length on various properties.

 I wonder where people initially did not think of backwards compatibility or 
whether they expected nobody would do this. This is rather annoying :-/.

> So, no one around here seems to have any objections to this idea re:
> the WORKAREA property.  And I've seen more than one window manager
> author complain about the lack of support for non-trivial xinerama
> setups.  I would suggest that _NET_WORKAREA be deprecated in favour of
> a new property, _NET_WORKAREA_MONITORS.  The same functionality of
> using _NET_WORKAREA can be acheived from _NET_WORKAREA_MONITORS.
>
> The format, as previously stated would be:
> _NET_WORKAREA_MONITORS, x, y, width, height CARDINAL[][][4]/32
>
> Which is an array of (x, y, width, height) tuples.
>
> A window manager MAY combine two or more monitors together into a
> single (x, y, width, height) in the property, if it deems this
> appropriate (basically, only the trivial xinerama case, without any
> partial struts along the long edge, all monitors using the same sized
> desktop).

 Especially given this, I suggest _NET_WORKAREA_AREAS as the name. Well, not 
that nice name either, but I'm bad at names.

> I would like to write a proposal for this if there are still no
> objections.  However even simple submissions with no objections in the
> past seem to get ignored on this list.  Who are those currently
> responsible for making commits to the wm-spec document?

 I don't think there's anybody "responsible".  The spec is a collective work. 
If you want something added to it, post a proposal here, incorporate 
feedback, repeat until there's no feedback, ask for inclusion. I can do the 
commit then if you have no account.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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