GNUstep and EWMH

[Fred Kiefer <fredkiefer gmx de>]

When I send the following question to the xdg mailing list a few days 
ago, I was pointed to this list. Now I expect, that the same people that 
pointed me to here will be willing to answer in more detail. (At least 
at GNUstep we would do so :-))

Please reply directly, as I don't want to subscribe yet another mailing 
list.

Cheers
Fred


...
At the moment I am looking into better support for the window manager 
standard and there a problem shows up. OpenStep has the concept of a 
window having a style (e.g. with or without border decoration) and a 
window level (normal, floating, modal panel, sub menu, main menu and so 
on). I tried to match the later onto the EWMH window type. I found 
various problems with this, which also did vary between different EWMH 
window managers and different versions of them.
First the concept of a menu in EWMH seems to be different from the 
OpenStep free floating menu, which should stay on top of other windows. 
To work around this I maped the main menu to dock and the sub menus to 
menu. As this had some side effects (on KDE 3.1) to the window 
decoration, I had to switch that off with the KDE override atom.
Although this solution somehow works on most window managers, it is less 
than optimal and a clear definition of the different window types and 
what they should result in, could help me find a better correlation. Or 
at least it would allow me to blame the window managers for not 
following the standard.