Proposal for a general setup panel (overview)

[Olivier Fourdan]

Hi all,

Back to work after 3 weeks. I didn't work on xfwm4 lately, but I still
used (some) of my brain.

I came with a proposal. Here comes the highlights :

- We standardize on xsettings protocol for all settings (note this
doesn't include apps data such as xfce4 menus for example)
- We need to write our own xsetting manager
- A tree view will give access to all option, ordered by applications.
- It will be modular. Every application that wants to use it will have
to provide a plugin for the xsetting manager. That plugin will be in
charge of loading/saving specific settings and display part of the GUI.
- to call the GUI, from the application, the application will set a
specific atom (X11) to an hidden window belonging to the xsetting
manager and then send a synthetic MapRequest event to that window (using
XSendEvent). The role of the atom is to provide the specific module to
display. E.g., xfce4 wants to display its setup panel, more specifically
the option for the panel position, it will first set the atom
XFCE_SETTING_MODULE to "apps/xfce4/position" and send an XEvent to a
given window.
- If the path to the module to display, the xsetting-manager will
display a message stating that the module is not installed or not
implemented.

What do you think ? 

Cheers, 
-- 
Olivier               <fourdan at xfce.org>            http://www.xfce.org
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