[PATCH] xdg_shell: Adding a new shell protocol.

[Jasper St. Pierre]

Just so we're clear, the goal wasn't to omit them entirely and say "nope"
to any future additions. The goal was to prevent stalling with bikeshedding
on the list again, and land this *for now*. And you're fully welcome to
have any input on how these things should be implemented in xdg_shell when
that time comes.

I fully intend to support the three major focus modes (click-to-focus,
sloppy focus, FFM) in mutter, for both X and Wayland clients, as our
customers require it.

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 1:23 PM, Gregory Merchan
<gregory.merchan at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 3:29 PM, Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre at mecheye.net>
> wrote:
> > . . .
> > What's going to happen from here is that this is going to land in Weston,
> > not in Wayland (I hope, at least; the subject doesn't say so!). Rafael
> > Antognolli is also going to write the Weston/Westoy patches, and I'm
> going
> > to write the GTK+/mutter support. It is going to be unstable for the time
> > being. Requests and events might get added or removed, and the version
> > number won't change. Your code might break for a few months while we
> figure
> > stuff out.
> >
> > What I'd love to happen is for everybody (Enlightenment/EFL, GNOME/GTK+,
> > KDE/Qt, and all other interested parties) to write their support for it.
> The
> > idea here is that we have a small common base, implement that in code,
> and
> > then once we're all done with that, we look at expanding back to around
> what
> > the EWMH has support for.
> >
> > That means it's currently missing features. Support for layers like
> > always-above / always-below isn't in this dump. Support for different
> focus
> > modes isn't either. . . .
>
> You should be aware that sophisticated focus modes have been possible
> on X for almost 20 years, but they have never been implemented because
> of misunderstandings, chicken-and-egg problems with window managers
> and toolkits, required API changes, and probably a number of other
> reasons. Wayland, left as it is now, will be only slightly better than
> X in this regard; the lack of a split like between the X server and
> window managers allows for better filtering of focus change requests,
> however they are implemented.
>
> Misunderstandings abound both in technical terms and in user interface
> design. While the technical misunderstanding are less of a problem
> since Wayland is a new system, the UI misunderstandings remain
> because, unless you've used MacOS often enough in certain ways, you
> don't know what you're missing. Programmers, it seems, are not the
> people likely to be doing things that make these features desirable;
> accordingly, they have no natural motivation to implement them.
>
> While it will be possible to make a compositor that supports getting
> focus right and toolkits that do the right thing, the chicken-and-egg
> problem will remain.
>
> When last I checked--about a year ago--the only API with support for
> getting focus right was GNUstep's.
>
> Almost 10 years ago, I filed bug reports for Gtk+ and Metacity (then
> GNOME's window manager) to get this working correctly on X. I
> submitted patches for Metacity and was working on the patches for Gtk+
> until I had to stop for personal reasons. It had also become apparent
> that, even with working code, I would have to overcome the previous 10
> years of bias about how X "should" work.
>
> I'll be quiet now.
>



-- 
  Jasper
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