Re: State across application invocation

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2002 at 05:01:53PM -0500, James Willcox wrote:
<snip>
> Yeah, I've been working on this for a while.  Actually, I sent a
> proposed specification to the xdg-list some time ago
> (https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/xdg-list/2002-July/000574.html). 
> I have been quietly hacking on a new version which uses an XML document
> instead of a flat file for storage, and uses a property on the root
> window for notification.
<snip>

Please don't do this. There are any number of applications which could be
listening to the root window for notification of various things. As more
apps are listening for more things the entire system takes a performance
hit. Programs listening for one of the many messages still have to wake up
and process other messages because there is no fine-tuning at this level.

Something along the lines of the xsettings protocol is surely better suited
for this; assuming that this shouldn't be on the client side where the files
are.

Other examples of how to arrange for notification without taking a hit are
the system tray protocol, a proper clipboard manager, and a proper window
manager. The xsettings and system tray protocols are at freedesktop.org.
Sample implementations are there (I think), in gnome-settings-daemon, and
in the libegg tray. Metacity shares FVWM's selection manager code so you can
look in either for an example of that; the spec for that is the ICCCM.

Cheers,
Greg