Clipboard time-outs

[Daniel Vogelheim]

Hi all,

I hope this question is appropriate for the list, as it concerns 
interoperability of clipboard implementations: What is considered an 
appropriate time-out value for clipboard operations?

The reason I'm asking is a bug filed against OpenOffice.org/StarOffice 
with problems when copy&paste-ing from Mozilla to OOo on Linux. The 
problem turned out to be that the data transfer takes longer than 
expected, and OOo aborts the transfer due to a time-out. As far as I 
understand the matter, a time-out is necessary to guard against failures 
of other applications due to the asynchronous nature of the clipboard 
data transfer. The time-out was set arbitrarily at 3s, which was 
considered generous for transfering a few KB of data and has worked well 
in the past. Increasing the time-out value solves this specific problem, 
but I'm not sure which value is appropriate, or whether that's a good 
idea at all; maybe there's a better solution.

Thanks for any help.

Sincerely,
Daniel