Re: [Nautilus-list] remembering different properties in different directories?

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 16Oct2001 08:23PM (-0400), Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> 
> Seriously, I would probably honor all configure requests on semantic
> type NORMAL if I had to ship Metacity as more than my personal
> entertainment prototype, and probably would honor size changes on
> dialogs. The only thing I'd probably put in production is ignoring
> position hints on dialogs. This is because on some level you can't
> fight the system, and also because of GUI toolkit API complexity -
> "just set the position" is the only thing most developers will
> understand.
> 
> But for my personal use, I prefer to have some apps that don't work
> quite as intended (e.g. splashscreen gets cascaded), than have dialogs
> jumping around and gnome-terminals in stupid places and so on.  Also,
> I like windows to stay the size/position I made them, changing at
> runtime breaks how I've arranged my windows. And I can fix all the
> apps I use personally to support the semantic types and correct
> geometry hints, because they are all open source. ;-) So the "app
> authors won't understand it" argument doesn't matter so much to me.
> 
> Also, I want to prototype a WM that ignores configure requests, so I
> can see the issues involved and get all the needed semantic hints in
> the EWMH spec, or at least see that it won't work for reasons XYZ.  It
> isn't really bloating EWMH, because the semantic types all involve
> different decorations, etc. in addition to size handling.

OK, I think that's interesting for a personal prototype but I don't
think application authors should have to design their apps to work
with your admittedly non-production-suitable system.

Honestly I think your change is pretty illusionary, because apps will
just end up setting the wrong semantic type or weird hints to bypass
your rules, which will result in an even more broken system than
letting apps do what they want.

I had a much longer response in mind, but since you don't think your
experiment is suitable for real-world use, I don't think Nautilus or
other apps should be changed to take it into acount, and so debating
the issue is not worthwhile.


I guess I'd like to add that even though ICCCM allows the window
manager to ignore application size change requests, it's impossible to
write reasonable apps under that assumption, so apps assume it works
and all window managers implement it, and it's become a de facto
standard (much as ignoring UPosition and PPosition hints has also
become a de facto standard). 

I'm reminded of the way Microsoft implemented the POSIX standard,
where they interpreted every open question in the spec opposite to the
way people expected it to work, and the way qmail implemented SMTP by
doing the exact opposite of every MAY or SHOULD clause in the
RFC. Yes, it's technically compliant, but not in a useful way.

Regards,

Maciej