Suggestion for Xorg / about middle-mouse click pasting

[Adam Jackson]

(accidentally sent to just sam initially, whoops)

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 7:22 AM Sam Varshavchik
<sam.varshavchik at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 4:30 AM Böszörményi Zoltán <zboszor at pr.hu> wrote:
> > 2020. 07. 30. 21:20 keltezéssel, Dennis Clarke írta:
> > > On 7/30/20 6:39 PM, Elie Goldman Smith wrote:
> > >> Countless people on forums ...
> > >
> > > Also they are not the source code nor would I rely on what countless
> > > people say on just about any matter whatsoever.  I am not sure when
> > > the horrific "popular is correct" logic became almost defacto pure
> > > truth but I reject it.  I am certain I am not alone but I also do not
> > > have a mathematical proof handy to refute the "popular is correct"
> > > notion.  At least not yet.
> >
> > Let me suggest an analogue / convergent notion, which is also popular
> > among engineers: "ten billion flies can't be wrong. let's eat sh*t"
> > I am not sure this refutes the "popular is correct" logic but it
> > certainly puts things into perspective.
>
> That's somewhat besides the point. The point is that the server has
> absolutely no control over this functionality. Anyone who actually
> knows and understands X11 (and not some uncounted number of people in
> some mysterious forums) will know that.
>
> If someone believes otherwise, they are free to download the source to
> the Xorg server, make whatever the change they believe will adjust
> that behavior, and prove everyone else wrong.

Fine, I'm feeling contrarian:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/snippets/1127

The server _absolutely_ has control over this. The value of the
PRIMARY property, from the requesting client's perspective, is
whatever the server says it is. There's no reason the server needs to
tell you the truth. I'm pretty sure you could craft selinux policy to
do this and not even need to patch your server.

The point is: opinions about this are not universal. PRIMARY's
behaviour is so thoroughly baked into both client software and a
non-trivial subset of user expectation that anyone saying "obviously
it should be turned off" is projecting. Likewise anyone who cut their
teeth on a sun3 and thinks UI design was perfected with the Athena
widget set is intentionally ignoring the absolutely massive
popularization of access to computing since 1992.

Nobody needs a manifesto about this. If you want to improve the world
here the quantity of code needed is really quite small. I would like
to think the xorg developers are friendly and approachable enough that
people would feel comfortable asking how to make these kinds of
changes and where to start hacking. We've done tremendous amounts of
work over the last 15-odd years to eliminate the irrelevant code and
make what's left pleasant to work on. Please don't make me feel like
that's been wasted effort.

- ajax