compiz team mailing list archive

[Sam Spilsbury <smspillaz@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 7:10 AM, Anthony Francis
<455378@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> What progress has been made on rolling this behavior back? As far as I
> can see reading through the attached links the change behind this
> breakage fixes a non-problem (windows can always be moved and resized
> through the task list) but it breaks a large number of programs,
> including any window which tries to create itself at a size that would
> span two monitors, not to mention xemacs, blender and especially No
> Machine which reacts very, very badly to this. Assigning a keystroke to
> do the resize does not fix the problem; any window that then tries to
> tweak itself after resizing shrinks back to one monitor.
>
> I've looked at the code which *apparently* affects this change (not
> being a compiz expert ... more than one thing may be involved here) and
> it really doesn't make sense - there was a clear setting which
> enabled/disabled this behavior, which was completely removed in favor of
> trying to be "smart". This was almost certainly not tested on multiple
> monitors as I can't imagine someone who'd seen what happens actually
> submitting it, much less making it into a release.  I'm working on a
> change to roll this back on a personal build, but that will of course
> get out of sync as Compiz is updated.
>
> Please, please, roll this back or roll forward a fix! This is close to a
> dealbreaker on a piece of software I've used successfully for years, and
> some of the comments made about this bug being a non-problem simply
> stagger me as clearly they haven't seen how badly this breaks Compiz.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are a member of compiz
> packagers, which is subscribed to compiz in ubuntu.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/455378
>

Hi Anthony.

According to the EWMH the default expected behavior for all window
managers is to fullscreen windows only on the *active* monitor (See
_NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN[1]). However if your application wants to
expand over *multiple* monitors then it needs to set the
_NET_WM_FULLSCREEN_MONITORS hint[2] on the root window.

So this behaviour is already supported in compiz - but your
application which wants to fullscreen over multiple monitors needs to
specify this hint in order to do that. The reason we don't fullscreen
over multiple monitors by default is because it doesn't make sense in
the majority of usecases - eg most fullscreened applications on both
monitors actually just looks awful, such as web browsers, video
players etc. However it makes sense in some cases such as yours which
is why we include that hint.

Let the author of your VNC client know that they should support this
hint and when they do your application should just work.

[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html#id2551694
[2] http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html#id2552578

> Title:
>  Can't resize windows to be displayed on several monitors
>
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-- 
Sam Spilsbury