Re: State of the X clipboard, and perhaps a solution

[Jerry Haltom <wasabi larvalstage net>]

> It also means that an application is not allowed to crash if it owns the
> clipboard, and in fact, that it must ignore SIGTERM/SIGINT/etc, since
> the naive user most likely doesn't understand that killing the
> application would result in the clipboard data going away.

What sends SIGTERM? The window manager certainly doesn't. If the user
purposely kills a locked process, I don't think we HAVE to preserve the
data.

A locked process hanging in the background is definitely a consideration
however. Currently, if a process locks up, and it has a window, metacity
can know this and volunteer to terminate the process for you. In the
scenario I proposed, the application is no longer visible.

However, is it not possible, and in fact a good idea, for metacity (or
gnome-session, or another program), to monitor the state of the
clipboard? Now, I don't mean request the data. Simply watch who owns the
clipboard, and if that process stops responding after a bit offer to
kill it?

> You're not going to be able to make "copy" behave 100% like it copies
> the data unless it actually does copy the data.

And you're not going to be able to make content negotiation behave 100%
like it negotiates content, unless a program that can do the negotiating
is still around.

It's a simply fact that you cannot hand off the data in some operations
to a daemon. Not even MS does that. :0  Consider an audio editing
program. A user opens a FLAC in one program, and pastes it as a WAV into
another program. We don't have any examples of this on the Linux desktop
yet, but on the Windows/Mac desktop there are many. We cannot ignore
that we will eventually have applications which require large data sets
to be copied between processes. If we do ignore it now, we'll get bit in
the ass later, and developers will start implementing there own custom
hacks to get the process to work as they'd want.

I visualize a day when you can take ANY image, from ANY program, in ANY
format, and paste it into another program. This means the image might be
converted from one format to another. I do not think aiming for this
goal is a bad thing... in fact I think it's a necessity.

-- 
Jerry Haltom <wasabi larvalstage net>

Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html