Re: Swallowed apps

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Phil Dumont <phil solidstatescientific com> writes: 
> Yeah, how to choose options is a difficult question to answer.  But
> certainly, a part of the answer is that, if an option is already there,
> then there's a good chance that someone is already using it, and if it
> is removed, someone will miss it.  The impact of removing an existing
> option is greater than the impact of not introducing an option that
> has never been there, and therefore should be done with care.

Certainly true, but I think the introduction of options in earlier
GNOME versions had been done with so little care, that worrying too
much about avoiding their loss would have meant making very little
progress.

Now that it's much harder to get an option _in_, we can probably
afford to be more conservative about taking an option _out_.

(The other practical issue is that until you take an option out, the
1% of technical users will use it to work around a usability problem -
meaning that the 1% of the world that uses bugzilla doesn't complain,
file bugs, or make patches - whiele 99% of users are just stuck with
the usability problem. Nuking an option is often a way to get the 1%
in gear to fix things. In practice this works pretty well...)

That said I think your example of swallowed apps is not an
option/preference but rather a feature - and my comments that were
quoted weren't intended to apply to features in general.
 
> How do I use it?  I have my emacs configured so that all frames
> are minibufferless -- there is a single one-line frame that is
> minibuffer only, and all other emacs frames share that minibuffer.
> The minibuffer frame is the swallowed app.  (It sounds weird, but
> once you get used to it, it's rather nice.)  I also have a swallowed
> xload.

This is a cute hack, but you probably have to admit that very few
people ever used the feature this way... it's something that almost no
one, even technical users, would even think of, let alone figure out
how to do.

xload is more obvious, but we do have panel applets that provide
equivalent functionality, and expect that if those applets are worse
than xload in interesting ways the applets will be fixed, or other
applets will pop up.

Also, like the window manager "matched window" feature, swallowed apps
have the fundamental UI issue that users have to manually intervene
with the arcane implementation detail of window class/name to get them
to work.

All told we're looking at a very niche feature, that's primarily
useful with old Xlib-only apps.

> In another post to this thread, someone said something to the effect
> that if anyone cares enough about it to fix the problems, then
> further discussion would be productive.  A valid point.  Maybe,
> someday...  But then again, discussion before the fix happens
> might be worthwhile.  I might be more motivated to fix it if I
> had some level of confidence that Gnome would put the feature back
> in if it were fixed...?

If you want to know the practical problem, it is that the window
manager and the panel "fight" over the application - the window
manager is trying to put a window border around it, and the panel is
trying to move it into the panel. This can result in confusing the
window manager, the panel, the application, or all three.

So there needs to be a defined reliable way for it to work, most
likely requiring window manager modifications.

Havoc