xdg-shell's set_parent method

[Olivier Fourdan]

Hi,

xdg-shell's set_parent [1] request is used by toolkits and compositors to achieve what is done with transients in X11.

But the ICCCM in X11 allows for transients to be "None", in which case the dialog will be treated as a transient for the group by most X11 window managers. Some applications (gtk+ based, primarily, I reckon) don't even use the transient relationship at all, because the window manager will automatically place windows of type "dialog" on top of the other windows of the same group.

I have not found an equivalent of the notion of group in Wayland (maybe the app_id could be used for that? [2]), but then passing NULL to set_parent will unset the parent relationship and not treat the surface as a child of multiple other surfaces from the same group.

Is this something desirable in Wayland, do we want to have something comparable to transient from group in ICCCM?

Cheers,
Olivier

[1] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/tree/unstable/xdg-shell/xdg-shell-unstable-v5.xml#n171
[2] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/tree/unstable/xdg-shell/xdg-shell-unstable-v5.xml#n197