unity-design team mailing list archive

[Sam Spilsbury <smspillaz@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 2:48 AM, Cody Russell <bratsche@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > From: Martin Gräßlin <kde@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> > It would be unacceptable that windows cannot be closed if they
>> > hung.
>
> Hi Martin,
>
> Sorry I've been absent from this discussion, I haven't really felt I had
> much to say yet.  And I generally avoid Ayatana list because I have the
> same problem you have with it.. all the email goes to my @canonical.com
> but whatever I write from that address gets blocked, while mail from my
> @gnome.org goes through for some reason.
>
> Anyway, I just wanted to comment on this statement and point out that
> this is not a hugely difficult problem to solve with some cooperation
> from a WM.  I would assume a WM can monitor _NET_WM_PING and either
> popup a dialog, or we could create a hint to expose a region of the
> close button to the WM for this purpose.
>
> So one reason I have not been commenting on this discussion is that
> quite frankly, I agree with you that right now they may not be ready to
> land in a distribution due to many of the problems you have cited.  It
> seems sort of clear to me that there needs to be more development time
> in order for CSD to catch up in certain respects.  However, this in
> itself is not a reason to abandon the development effort altogether.
>
> >From what I can tell, window manager decorators need to jump through an
> extraordinary number of hoops in order to make a window decoration and
> the application appear to be one.  KWin seems to do this really well,
> and I think we're all really impressed with it.  But at the same time,
> why should we not explore the opposite approach as well?  Rather than
> having two processes trying to draw what is essentially the same
> application and do a lot of work to make them look the same, why not try
> drawing them from the same process and do less work to get the
> functionality back (e.g., the close button hint I described above)?
> This strikes me as being a lot less work than trying to do in our WM
> what you've done in KWin.

If you're talking about reparenting, then pretty much every window
manager does this. Including metacity and mutter. Compiz sort of does
in upcoming versions, although for a while now it has used a hack
where decorations are drawn as an auxiliary texture around windows.

In every usecase where this applies (remember that there is always the
fallback "i can't do this" ewmh hint that wouldn't be read), I'm sure
that for every window manager that draws a decoration window, it is
not incredibly difficult to draw a few more pixels.

Unlike adding a bunch of workarounds to cope with CSD.

>
> I disagree that our approach is fundamentally flawed.  But I admit that
> I do agree we perhaps should not be pushing it into our distro yet, and
> we should be working with you guys on wm-spec-list more to discuss
> issues like the hints I described above before we try to really release
> it.  This is my fault, not some Canonical conspiracy to try to fuck you
> guys over or anything. ;)  I'm dealing with other projects, and due to
> the relatively short development cycle for Ubuntu it sometimes makes it
> difficult for me to plan and execute proper coordination with upstreams,
> especially ones that I'm not very familiar with (such as wm-spec-list).
> I'll take full responsibility for that, so please don't hold it against
> Ubuntu or Canonical.  Hold it against me if you want to. ;)
>

As a sidenote, even though I stand on the "csd's are bad" side of this
flamewa^Wdiscussion, I don't want to give the impression that I'm in
any way hostile towards canonical for their design decisions, and even
if after realizing that canonical is essentially ignoring the
developers of the very projects by which they depend, I'll be happy to
accept patches upstream to make CSD work *somewhat* well. However, I
won't accept patches that require that people use CSD, and I don't
have the time to write the CSD code myself, since I am incredibly busy
with my university degree.

Kind Regards,

Sam.

> / Cody
>
>



-- 
Sam Spilsbury