Temporary resolution changes?

[Bill Crawford]

Eric Anholt wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-05-20 at 10:59 +0100, Luke Benstead wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I recently had a discussion with a Wine developer and I mentioned that
>> I had on several occasions been left at a low resolution when a
>> fullscreen application crashes. He said that Wine could perhaps code
>> in a fix which guaranteed the resolution was reset but he wasn't sure
>> where this problem lied, or more specifically which project should fix
>> it, as native games also suffer the same problem.
>>
>> Incidentally, the previous day I had been in a PC store and started up
>> SuperTux on a netbook in the shop, I came back a few minutes later to
>> find the desktop at a low resolution, the game had obviously crashed
>> (desperate not to give a bad impression of Linux to passers by I reset
>> the netbook ;) ) so I know it's quite a common issue.
>>
>> After more discussion with the Wine dev I learned/realized that
>> Windows generally doesn't suffer a similar problem, because setting
>> the CDS_FULLSCREEN flag in the DEVMODE structure (passed to
>> ChangeDisplaySettings) indicates a temporary resolution change. If the
>> program crashes, or is ALT+TABbed away from, Windows (usually) resets
>> the resolution back to native.
>>
>> After some discussion on some forums I found this bug report:
>> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14255
>>
>> I really just interested to find out from you guys where you think the
>> problem lies? Is it something that the X.org devs can fix? Or is it
>> something that should be fixed higher up? Is a "temp flag" perhaps
>> something that can be passed to xrandr when a resolution is set?
> 
> I'd love to see an extension to RandR to handle this.  It's been a
> serious problem of X's modesetting APIs forever.

In particular, the notifications of a change need to include the flag so 
that window managers can avoid totally rearranging desktop panels and 
windows to fit the tiny resolution :o) as the mess left afterwards can 
take a while to clear up if like me you retentively arrange everything. 
Perhaps, even, the temporary flag would cause *no* notification to be 
sent, but then you'd have to detect when that client lost focus and 
change resolution, rather than rely on the WM to do it.