_NET_WORKAREA and multiple monitors

[Olivier Fourdan]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 7:11 AM, Yves-Alexis Perez<corsac at debian.org> wrote:
> On lun, 2009-08-03 at 15:58 -0700, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
>> >> Basically, the spec says:
>> >>
>> >> "Work area SHOULD be used by desktop applications to place desktop
>> >> icons appropriately"
>> >>
>> >> If you include non visible area, you will end up with icons
>> >> potentially being invisible, which defeats the benefits of having
>> >> _NET_WORKAREA
>>
>> Right, but _NET_WORKAREA is then useless on multihead when you have
>> monitors with different resolutions if you follow that interpretation.
>> Well, maybe not "useless" -- it does serve the purpose of ensuring that
>> you don't place things in non-visible areas.  But it also artificially
>> "hides" some (potentially large) areas that *are* visible.
>
> Might be a good idea to port that to netwm ML (if they have one) or talk
> with metacity/kwin people about this (or even other wms). Basically
> there's no way _NET_WORKAREA can be non-rectangular, I guess?

Correct.

> So either
> you lose some visible space, or you have some invisible space. I guess
> the former (current xfwm solution) is safer, but then you have problems
> with xfce4-notifyd.

xfce4-notifyd does not necessarily have to use _NET_WORKAREA, although
it's better because it reports the size minus the struts.

> But what exactly is the problem for xfce4-notifyd,
> except it doesn't put any notification on the bottom of the right
> monitor? (same goes for xfdesktop). Is there a shift or something?

Cheers,
]Olivier.