Copy and Paste issues

[Sean Middleditch]

On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 23:15 -0500, Erik Harrison wrote:
> I'm unsure if this is the place to put this, but if not, perhaps
> someone could redirect me.
> 
> Copying to the clipboard is behaving like a PRIMARY selection. I don't
> know when this behaviour started, and I only recently realized that it
> wasn't a bug in my application.
> 
> Whenever a copy is performed in an application, that data is lost from
> the clipboard as soon as the application closes. This happens across
> apps, toolkits, and desktop environments. Is there a X.org
> configuration that causes this issue?
> 
> Don't tell me it's been happening this way for 7 years now, and I just
> now caught on. :-(

Yes, it has been happening forever, and you just now caught on.  ;-)
This is actually a pretty big topic of debate/discussion over the last
year or so.  The problem is that applications never actually copy
anything to a clipboard - there is no real clipboard.

When you paste the receiving app requests the content to be transfered
from the app that "owns" the clipboard at the moment you perform the
paste.  Therefor, if you copy something from an app and close it, the
data is lost, because the app loses ownership of teh clipboard and can
no longer do transfers.