Re: [Patch] A clipboard daemon for gnome-settings-daemon

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Sat, Sep 06, 2003 at 11:10:09AM +1000, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-09-06 at 04:41, Hongli Lai wrote:
> > A while ago there has been a discussion about integrating a clipboard
> > daemon in GNOME which keeps the content of the clipboard in memory, so
> > that even if the owner application exits the clipboard will not be lost.
> > Here's a patch for gnome-settings-daemon (against most recent anonymous
> > CVS) which does exactly that. No configuration options - it's supposed to
> > Just Work(tm).
> > I've tested this extensively for several weeks and it works fine
> > (including QT and Mozilla apps).
> > This patch can also be applied against the latest stable release of 
> > control-center.
> 
> This is going to seem like broken record, but...

 ... it's important enough to bear repetition. ;-)

> Does this address any of the valid concerns with things like Klipper the
> Jody Goldberg has raised elsewhere: content negotiation with the paste
> target, enormous memory usage in some circumstances, etc?

I looked at the patch earlier, and didn't see a few of the atoms that would
be needed for this to work "perfectly".

One of those is the MANAGER atom for the message which should be sent to root
when the clipboard manager takes over. However, I was very happy to see that
CLIPBOARD_MANAGER is there.

Since the MANAGER atom isn't interned, I'm inclined to look for other ICCCM
violations. "Timing is everything," and without good timestamps, etc.
things could break.

> The difficulty is that without solving those problems, this is not a
> daemon that you can have turned on by default, since it essentially
> breaks some applications (most of Jody's examples talk about Gnumeric
> cutting and pasting, but there are similar things with XML documents
> such as documentation editors, SVG editors, etc.).

Here is Motif's solution, as I understand it:

  http://www.phys.lsu.edu/~merchan/motif-utm

Supporting that would require new API for indicating and transferring
deferred targets. No changes would be needed for pasting programs.

Cheers,
Greg