[sugar] Supporting desktop applications, extending the EWMH spec

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 12:56 AM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Marco and I have been discussing on how to make a window manager like
>> Metacity fit into the Sugar environment, and based on our current
>> discussions, as well as past discussions, it seems clear that we need
>> changes to the Extended Window Manager Hints spec[1]. For details on
>
> I think you are confusing the role of the Window Manager.  When I run
> sugar under metacity, I don't *want* my activities to be full screen.
> When I use a windowing wm, I expect them to be in (decorated) windows.
>  Ideally, the sugar home view would run on root, like in nautilus.
>

Metacity was provided just as an example. The issue here is that we
want to replace Matchbox with something which would let us support
normal desktop applications better, ideally without requiring any kind
of modification to the applications themselves. (better support, for
instance means, not messing up The Gimp)

> On the XO, we are using a special tiling window manager.  You can use
> a window manager like XMonad on your non-XO if you want that style of
> window management.  That's a window manager property, sugar activities
> should have nothing to do with it.
>

Agreed. But are sugar activities (or rather, should sugar applications
be) the same as normal desktop applications from a window manager
peerspective.

> When I'm running Browse in my window, and then select Fullscreen mode,
> *then* it applies the full screen hint, and really *does* run full
> screen.  This is just like Firefox does.
>

Yes, that is why I'm still somewhat opposed to running all our
activities with the "FULLSCREEN" hint permanently on - IMO, we need to
differentiate between the two modes of an application or an activity,
and the window manager needs to know about that.

Thanks,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]