WINDOWPATH environment variable?

[Samuel Thibault]

----- Forwarded message from Sébastien Hinderer <Sebastien.Hinderer at ens-lyon.org> -----
Hi,

Carsten Haitzler :
> now given that, i suspect you are trying to attack a problem the wrong way. why
> do you need such a path as an environment variable? what are you trying to do,
> why do you need such a window id chain?

Our goal is to provide a uniform way for applications to communicate with
braille terminals. This allows applications to write text to a braille
display, and to read and handle keys pressed on the keyboard of braille
terminals. The communication layer we provide also handles concurrent
accesses to the lesource. That is, several applications are allowed to
communicate with braille terminals simultaneously, but only the
application having the focus will have its information sent to the
braille device.

The way this concurrency management scheme is implemented is that each
client tells the server in which window it is running. In addition,
the server always knows which window has the focus, either because it
found out this information on its own, or because a client told it who
has the focus. And this is how the server can, at any moment, know
precisely whichApplication should be allowed to communicate with the
braille terminal. And this is where the WINDOWPATH environment
variable would help. It would let clients know where they are.

That being said, we remain of course open to any suggestion, so please
let us know if you have ideas about how we could deal with this problem
in another way.

Cheers,
Sébastien.