Extending XFixes Extension

Amir Bukhari ufz6 at rz.uni-karlsruhe.de
Thu Nov 4 14:09:08 PST 2004


On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 13:25 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 19:18 +0100, Amir Bukhari wrote:
> > The current Xserver does not give client the ability to query the server to
> > ask it which window belongs to (to client). A good example is: a Window
> > Manager can build a list of all window which belong to a client and so it
> > can manipulate its appearance as it wants and each client could have its
> > look and feel differently from others clients. 
> > This may be needed with 3D desktop like ours (Looking Glass 3D).
> > 
> > What did you think about this feature to add it to Xfixes?
> 
> Should a window manager really treat windows differently based on what
> connection has been made to the display?
> 
> Would a window manager want to treat differently:
> 
>  - Multiple xterms on your desktop (different processes)
>  - Different gnome-terminals on your desktop (same process)
> 
> What about a single process that opens two display connections?
> 
> The ICCCM and the NET WM spec already give ways of having:
> 
>  - A group of windows with a group leader (in WM_HINTS)
>  - A session managed application (SM_CLIENT_ID)
>  - The PID of an application (though the window manager shouldn't
>    care about that either)

not all Application hold on this specification, they don't set their PID
or GROUP leader don't give our WindowManager enough information on what
we want.

> 
> I don't see any reason to extend that to listing particular display
> connections. It's somewhat interesting for a profiler - and the
> X-Resource extension I think does list clients. But other than that,
> I don't think it's relevant information.
> From rom what you are describing above, I think the concept you want
> is the window group based on the group leader.
> 
your though is based on 2D Desktop, what we implement is 3D Desktop,
that mean all top-level windows (including non-redirect one) are all
managed with 3D Window Manager, so it nees a lot of information about
application to render their top-level windows.
GNOME give for example give popup windows a group leader, which is
different of from dialog boxes and this also different from the main
application window, so 3D Manager doesn't know (for examole) to which it
should attache the popup menus. think about of you have more than
applications opened!

-Amir




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