minimized and stick windows

[Kristian Høgsberg]

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 2:30 AM, Pekka Paalanen <ppaalanen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 13 May 2013 17:26:28 -0500
> Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 4:14 PM, Rafael Antognolli <antognolli at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>> > Hi Jason,
>> >
>> > On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 9:26 PM, Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net>
>> > wrote:
>> > > Hi Rafael,
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 6:04 PM, Rafael Antognolli <antognolli at gmail.com>
>> > > wrote:
>> > >>
>> > >> Hello,
>> > >>
>> > >> I've been looking the Weston code relative to maximized windows, and
>> > >> it seems that the respective code for minimized windows wouldn't be
>> > >> hard to implement.
>> > >>
>> > >> The questions are: are there any plans to add it? Is there someone
>> > >> already working on it? If not, would it be OK if I start submitting
>> > >> patches to try to add support for this?
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > A month or two ago, Scott Morreau was working on it.  However, his work
>> > > never made into weston for a variety of reasons.  Personally, I'm glad to
>> > > see someone interested in working on it again because it's something that
>> > > wayland will need eventually.
>> > >
>> > > The place to start on it is probably with the following e-mail and the
>> > long
>> > > string of replies:
>> > >
>> > >
>> > http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-March/007814.html
>> > >
>> > > There was quite a bit of discussion about how to handle it from a
>> > protocol
>> > > level, but Scott never made an actual version 2.  I'd suggest you start
>> > by
>> > > reading the chain of e-mails (it goes into April, not just March).  There
>> > > were quite a few suggestions in there that could be incorporated.
>> > > Hopefully, you can pick through the e-mail discussion and figure out what
>> > > the consensus was.  It'd be good to have a pair of fresh eyes look at it.
>> >
>> > Thanks for pointing that out. I just went through the chain of
>> > e-mails, but I don't think there was a consensus there.
>> >
>> > It also seems that the minimize implementation is a little more
>> > complex than just hiding surfaces and marking some flags. Which makes
>> > me not so comfortable doing an implementation without a consensus
>> > about what should be implemented, and with some orientation.
>> >
>> > That said, I'm not sure I'm really going to take this task.
>> >
>>
>> I didn't intend to scare you off.  Honestly, I don't know for 100% certain
>> how much weston machinery is needed to implement it.  It would require some
>> sort of set of flags to keep the compositor and shell plugin in sync.  That
>> said, I don't know if its quite as difficult as Scott made it sound.
>>
>> As far as direction goes, the first thing is to think through use-cases and
>> settle on a protocol.  Unfortunately, the discussion I linked you to seemed
>> to go nowhere.  However, a lot of that was Scott saying, "This is the way I
>> want to do it and I'm not going to change."  If you look at the other
>> comments, I think there was some consensus in there (at least in a general
>> direction).  Feel free to throw some XML together and we can re-start the
>> discussion.  For that matter, if you can come up with a way to do it as a
>> weston extension for now (with the hopes of putting it in wayland core
>> later), things can be a lot more flexible and we can play around with
>> protocol concepts as we go.
>>
>> Once a basic protocol is in place, then the client-side needs to be
>> implemented in tinytk (window.c) and the server-side needs to be
>> implemented in weston.
>>
>> I'm sorry "I want to add X feature" isn't simpler.  Basically every new
>> major protocol piece goes through a long mailing list discussion and a lot
>> of revision.
>
> Also worth noting, that there are actually two different pieces of
> protocol involved with minimized windows:
>
> - the public protocol, likely part of wl_shell_surface, which all
>   applications use to communicate with the server. This is the
>   important part that will go under strict review, but it is probably
>   also the simpler of the two. You could also check what DE
>   projects have done on this (Gnome/gtk, KDE/Qt, EFL, ...).
>
> - the private protocol between Weston and weston-desktop-shell
>   specifically. As we have chosen to let weston-desktop-shell client do
>   all the GUI drawing, and minimized windows will need some GUI (a task
>   bar button, a menu list of windows) to be able to get them back, we
>   need protocol to inform weston-desktop-shell about the windows so it
>   can draw the GUI.
>
> But these should not be complicated, once you understand how the basics
> of a Wayland protocol work. And you don't need to have any complex
> foreign surface passing protocol to get window thumbnails by hovering
> the pointer over a taskbar button. Thumbnails can be added later, as it
> does not concern the public protocol at all.

We don't need even need to pull that complexity in in the first step.
We can simply allow mod-tab to select minimized windows and unminiized
if they're selected.

Kristian