Panel on SVN does not seem to be working with multihead 100%

[Joao Pedrosa]

Hello,

It would be very helpful if you could try out the latest SVN version.
> You will need to update libxfcegui4 and xfce4-panel. It should be quite
> a bit better now, but I still expect there to be plenty of problems.
>

I just tried it for 10 minutes or so and I see the improvement of starting a
new panel with its own independent configuration, also I see that now when I
click on the monitor switcher, the panel follows the choice accordingly. But
the main issues are still there, like:

1. When deleting the ".config" and ".cache" and starting from a fresh
install, all the new panels (two for each monitor, or 4 in total) go to the
first monitor (":0.0"), but the two of them that belong to the monitor on
the right, behave as if they were on the monitor on the right, but appear on
the monitor on the left.

1.1. Even when I configure the panels that belong to the monitor on the
right for them to appear on the monitor on the right, they still behave a
little bit weirdly, showing the wrong tasks on the tasklists.

2. The wordaround that I learned yesterday after talking to you -- to start
a second panel that worked fine until I had to restart Xfce,-- doesn't work
anymore. And I don't seem to find a good workaround this time.

In sum, I see the improvements but the issues changed a little bit with
them.

Solution I propose:

1. When starting the panel, the "DISPLAY" environment variable should have
higher priority over the configuration of the panel. This is important
because it will always be used in a fresh install and during the session
restarts, I think.

2. It's hard to sincronize and control the panel creations from a single
instance of the panel. Somehow you have started doing this, but to fine tune
this would take some testing and time. I think it's advisable to streamline
this process:

- promote the independence of the panels, relying on the way that they are
created by default, which means respecting the "DISPLAY" variable for
example.

- tag the panel with some random number to its configuration. Use the random
number in the session to load the configuration. I'm not quite sure how you
save and load the configuration, so I could be way off. :P

- use the DISPLAY variable in the storing and reloading of the panel
configuration, if it helps to identify the configuration for the panel.
Instead of ".config/xfce4/panel", use ".config/xfce4/display_0/panel/",
".config/xfce4/display_1/panel/", etc.

- when swapping the panel between monitors, maybe it would be better to kill
the panel and restart it with the new "DISPLAY" environment variable, this
way it would appear on the right monitor and control the right monitor,
luckily.

I really can't code this much and try it myself, but maybe you will have the
time and patience to look at it. :-) For incentive, think about the schools
that will use Xfce in machines with maybe four monitors, four keyboards and
four mouses. :-) I don't know how they do that, by the way.

Thanks. Any time.

Cheers,
Joao
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/attachments/20051023/3f6519f6/attachment.html>