xfdesktop woes

[Olivier]

Benny,


On Sat, 2004-05-29 at 23:35, Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> So, here's my 2cents: I'm really against the "take less care about multihead" 
> option. It causes way too much trouble. I just want to point out the trouble 
> with the mcs manager. Sure it works just nice in single screen mode, but its 
> current design does not allow any easy solution to make it multihead safe, I'm 
> trying to work out a backward compatible solution for this problem for about 
> three weeks now and its really non-trivial. I think taking care of multihead 
> issues the first time is way easier than having the trouble to fix it later 
> (this counts for everything, not just multihead, of course).

My plan was to modify the save/load channel fns to automatically append
the screen number if higher than 0.

Like .xfce4/settings/gtk.xml on screen 0
and .xfce4/settings/gtk-1.xml on screen 1 for example.

> And speaking of xfdesktop, and the probably addition of desktop icons one day, 
> it'll be easier to e.g. handle DnD of icons between screens within one 
> instance, than having to care about IPC (though DnD is always tricky). And 
> while being at it, I would really like to be able to move windows between 
> screens, which is currently not possible because each screens has its own 
> xfwm4 instance (this is no feature request, just a point to think about, esp. 
> when speaking about usability).

Having an single instance of xfwm4 managing all screen would not be
enough to allow dragging windows from one screeen to another.

Plus AFAICT, only GTK is able of screen migration. That means that other
apps won't benefit from that feature.

At last, making xfwm4 able to manage several screens is a lot more
complex than making any other app multiscreen aware (multiple windows
stacks, etc.)

> Don't get me wrong. I'm really a friend of simple solutions, but not if that 
> means that it'll require non-trivial work-arounds to get things done at a 
> later time.

I'm no friend of any solution, I just like code to be simple,
maintainable and software to be reliable.

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