Re: Pager and Desktop Layout

[Ryan Beasley <ryan beasley+foss gmail com>]

(Meant to send this to wm-spec-list, but while semi distracted and
having to manually copy stuff from the mailman archives, I goofed.
Apologies for the duplicate, Martin & Jason.)

> In fact the pager plasmoid is stopping to use the manager selection and not setting the
> desktop layout any more. The desktop layout is initially set by kwin and can be updated
> through the multiple desktops kcm. If other processes change the desktop layout KWin will
> adjust the layout though it may be that the setting change is lost when restarting KWin.
>
> In general I would say that the behavior if changes to desktop layout are not done through the
> expected way is undefined.

Hm. This poses a problem for me. One of the products I work on depends
on being able to reconfigure the desktop layout in a desktop
environment/window manager-agnostic manner. The idea is that the
properties of the destination desktop session are to (temporarily) be
in sync with a source desktop session. In my particular case, I'm not
concerned with persisting the settings across sessions, so not having
them saved as part of the KDE settings store isn't a problem.

If controlling the atom via _NET_DESKTOP_LAYOUT does go away, I'd very
much love to see a generic mechanism (e.g. D-Bus?) replace it, else I
have to add another implementation that knows how to speak KCM (I
guess?).

Handling to support and drive GNOME/KDE/kwin4/Metacity/Compiz/etc. all
separately is a major pain in the rear. wm-spec bits, at least when
they're supported correctly, makes my job much easier. :)

 - Ryan