xfwm4 compositor and the root pixmap.

[Olivier Fourdan]

Hi,

No it's not possible. At least with the compositor.

The compositor draws on the root window, therefore keeping whatever is
on the root window is not possible ... unless you know what was there
previously using one of the existing mechanism, e.g. using of of the
various existing root pixmap property.

As to why I disabled the root pixmap property in the build, that's
because some app will kill the owner of the previous pixmap. If that
happens to be the window manager, too bad.

So if you ask me, I'd rather say as it is now, it's better for
robustness. If you want the root pixmap to be taken into account for
by the WM, you could enable the option, but I would prefer not to be
the default in the built.

Cheers,
Olivier

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Nick Schermer <nick at xfce.org> wrote:
> Haven't tried anything of this, but what if xfwm4 does not touch the bg
> pixmap at all? Is that even possible.
>
> IIRC X preserves the pixmap as well, so why have xfwm4 handle this?
>
> Nick
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 9:47 PM, Alistair Buxton <a.j.buxton at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> When using compositing, xfwm4 fills it's background with solid grey,
>> and then drawing the user's wallpaper is left up to xfdesktop. That's
>> all fine, except that there's a few seconds after xfwm4 starts and
>> before xfdesktop starts where you can see the ugly grey. If your X11
>> login screen already set the user's wallpaper this looks bad, as it
>> goes grey, and then goes back to the correct image.
>>
>> Xfwm4 has some code inside MONITOR_ROOT_PIXMAP defines which is not
>> normally enabled. This does two things: it copies any pixmap it finds
>> at startup, and then it constantly monitors the root for changes.
>>
>> I think it would be a good idea to always copy the root pixmap on
>> startup, to avoid the few seconds of grey, even if MONITOR_ROOT_PIXMAP
>> is not defined. eg:
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/ali1234/xfwm4/commit/b7baa7aa60cdb80759e0872d0ab5a7cb59ec5c10
>>
>> Also, the different atoms used by various software to control the
>> RetainPermanent root pixmaps has many different possible names. Does
>> it make sense to add these? As well as XROOTPMAP and XSETROOT it
>> already checks, there is also _XROOTPMAP_ID and ESETROOT_PMAP_ID which
>> all have exactly the same meaning as far as I can tell. It seems like
>> it would be easy to add these, at least for the initial copy.
>>
>> What do you think about this?
>>
>> --
>> Alistair Buxton
>> a.j.buxton at gmail.com
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Xfce4-dev at xfce.org
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>
>
>
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