compositing: agreeing on a hint name for CMs requesting to draw the desktop background

[Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org>]

Compiz sets the _COMPIZ_WALLPAPER_SUPPORTED hint for requesting to draw
the desktop background. There is a patch against Nautilus [1] available
that uses this hint to draw the folder background with alpha=0.

I would like to bring up two issues:

1) We are a bit concerned because the hint is compiz-specific.

Maybe you could agree on a name that is used for signalling that the CM
wants to draw the desktop background? IMO *_WALLPAPER_SUPPORTED doesn't
sound very concise either.


2) Wallpaper modification application

Currently, when right-clicking the desktop one can also pick from a
popup menu to change the wallpaper using a GNOME-specific application.
This obviously is not adequate for CMs. Maybe they should be able to
give a hint about the name of the .desktop file that should be launched
to configure the desktop background?

I am not sure whether it is adequate to depend on this very specific
freedesktop.org spec, so maybe the CM should be forced to also specify a
binary basename or path. But then again, .desktop files are way more
flexible wrt startup notification, attempting to execute fallback
binaries etc.

Do we have to worry about remote sessions in this context?

Note that on top of such a hint, a xdg-* application could be written
which analyzes whether a CM is running, and runs the adequate background
change application.


best regards,
 Christian Neumair

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444320

-- 
Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org>