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

[Hongli Lai <h lai chello nl>]

On Saturday 06 September 2003 13:02, James Henstridge wrote:
> With the X clipboard model, the app may not read all 20MB of data into
> memory, but make it available for pasting (no data is transfered until
> the selection is requested).  If the app is smart, it can short circuit
> cut'n'paste operations within the application so that no data needs to
> be transfered through the X server.
>
> With a clipboard daemon, the selection will always be requested.  If the
> app provides the data in multiple formats (eg. a word processor
> providing the data in plain text, HTML, RTF, etc), the amount of data
> could easily exceed the size of the app's internal representation of the
> clipboard data.
>
> As Jody has said, it isn't clear that always requesting the clipboard
> data is a good idea.  Calling apps that work fine broken seems like a
> cop out.

I am aware of all this. But I don't see any other easy way to prevent the 
clipboard content from getting lost.
The other alternative is make applications transfer data to the daemon before 
they exit, but this requires modification in all applications (or at least 
the toolkits; depending on the situation). That's way too much work.

With this daemon, the X clipboard will work very similar to the Win32 
clipboard. Yes, memory is wasted, but the content doesn't get lost. And so 
far, I have seen a lot more people complaining about the X clipboard 
(hundreds) than the Win32 clipboard (nobody; ever heard a user critisize the 
Win32 clipboard? I haven't).