Question about the WNCK dependency (pager)

[Nick Schermer]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 10:07 AM, Andrzej <ndrwrdck at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 11/28/2011 03:33 PM, Nick Schermer wrote:
>>
>> Only adding a copy of the page to the panel plugin is not a problem. I
>> don't expect any fixes in the gtk2 branch of libwnck, it was already
>> hard to get things fixed while it was still the main branch. We indeed
>> switched to libwnck to drop the netk code, but if there are bugs that
>> annoy us or we want to improve the code, we don't have much choice.
>
> Alright, then. I'll go ahead with this. I'll keep it in a separate branch,
> just in case.
>
> There is one more thing I want to ask you about.
>
> Currently WNCK pager tries to take the ownership of the workspace
> management. You can see it for example in the settings of the number of rows
> of workspaces, which are currently placed in the pager settings (rather than
> workspace settings). This means that there is one "master" pager that is
> tied to the desktop and potentially more, which are in a "read only" mode
> (except that atm they don't update properly). Try to add several panels,
> each with a pager on it and look how weird the "slave" pagers behave when
> you start changing their orientations or number of rows.
>
> Libwnck upstream proposed to do the same with the orientation and "starting
> corner" settings, which I need for making the pager work well in the
> vertical mode. This complicates things even further, as for example rotating
> a "master pager" physically rotates the whole desktop. While this is
> supported by the EWMH spec:
> http://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html#id2550891
> I don't think we should rather leave the desktop in its original
> (horizontal) layout and only rotate the view (pager).
>
> Frankly speaking I think this design is poorly partitioned, which is one
> reason why the wnck pager is so inflexible. What I'd like to do instead is
> to:
> - stop the pager setting the workspace layout,

+1, year ago I already complained about that in the Gnome bug tracker,
since I think this is a window manager setting; they disagreed.

> - move the workspace layout settings to the workspace settings dialog (where
> IMHO it belongs),

+1, only involves the rows property right?

> - make sure that all the pagers (and the WM) are correctly updated when the
> workspace layout settings change,
> - add view-specific options to the pager itself (for example a rotated
> left/right view).
>
> Do you think this is a good thing to do? Or should we rather stick to the
> upstream design where the pager _is_ the workspace?

No that design splits the configuration settings. Pager is
display-only; xfwm4 set the properties (well xfce4-settings does
that..).

Nick