[sugar] Supporting desktop applications, extending the EWMH spec

[Bobby Powers]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
<mpgritti at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 12:13 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
> <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> Let's keep thinking about this.  For example, I wonder what Metacity does
>> to a window that is both  _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN and
>> _NET_WM_STATE_BELOW?  Does it stack it below the Frame, if the Frame is
>> _NET_WM_TYPE_DOCK and _NET_WM_STATE_ABOVE?  If not, could we convince the
>> Metacity developers that this is a good idea?
>
> I just thought of a worst problem with the FULLSCREEN approach.
> FULLSCREEN windows are always on the top of NORMAL windows.
>
> I think the general issue is that the meaning of FULLSCREEN type on
> the desktop is very different from our needs, sincethe typical use
> case is a video player. The type is used to mark windows which must
> be:
>
> 1 Always on the top of everything else.
> 2 Maximized/undecorated.
>
> We would need to drop 1.
>
>> What about making Activities run as _NET_WM_TYPE_DESKTOP? How does
>> Metacity handle multiple DESKTOP windows? (It probably isn't happy about
>> them...)
>
> I'm pretty sure it won't handle them as we would like. Also DESKTOP is
> used for the home/group/mesh view already.
>
>> It may be that we can find a way to make this work under stock Metacity if
>> we're creative.  If not, Metacity is under very active development.
>> Perhaps we can find a small change that resolves our problem and is
>> satisfying to upstream Metacity.
>
> It could be done by extending metacity (upstream) to provide an option
> to enable a different handling of FULLSCREEN windows. But what is the
> advantage over defining a new type which is more closely tied to our
> use case? The one I can think of is that existing toolkits has already
> a way to create fullscreen windows without using low level API.

Are we set on moving to metacity?  I remember murmurs of using xmonad,
as well as another wm I can't remember the name of.  Are these
stacking/hinting problems common to all window mangers, or just
metacity?

bobby

> Marco
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