New clipboard proposal

[Lubos Lunak]

Dne čt 30. prosince 2004 20:21 Philip Van Hoof napsal(a):
> Hi there fellow hackers, programmers and other people involved in the
> development of the freedesktop.
>
> There's been many problems with the current implementation of the X11
> clipboard. Before I start with my new proposal I'll guide you through
> the current implementation so you'll understand some terminology. If you
> already know everything about the clipboard on X11, you can skip all
> this, of course.
...
>
> There's many problems with this method:
>
> o. What happens when Mozilla got shut down before Evolution got
>    the chance to paste the clipboard?
>
> o. What happens when Mozilla has 400MB of data to deliver? A better
>    example might be "copying a large table from
>    gnumeric to Mozilla composer"
>
> o. What happens when you shutdown your X session. Is your
>    clipboard lost?
>
> To address these issues, I've cooked up a proposal. The proposal aims to
> replace the entire clipboard in the long run. But will provide full
> backwards compatibility for older X-clients. The proposal won't depends
> on any technology disliked by both KDE or GNOME.
>
> The proposal itself is incomplete. There's still a lot to agree upon.
>
> The proposal
>
> o. We'll still use the current protocol for advertising the fact
>    that there's support for the new-type clipboard. There's no problem
>    with still using the old-style clipboard.
>
> o. We add a TARGET "x-extension/dbus"
>
> o. The contents of the target explane the available
>    services on dbus. The format of the contents isn't
>    defined yet.
>
> o. We'll create a library that will do most for the application
>    developer

 I see two ways of interpreting this:
a) keep things the way they currently are, only use DBUS for large data 
transfers
b) build a completely separate clipboard mechanism, only use X for announcing 
it (in which case I think any dependency on X doesn't make sense if you don't 
want to really use X anyway)

 Which of these two possibilities is the one you have in mind?

>
> o. That library will initiate dbus in such a way that both
>    xclients/processes can enjoy the wonders of inter process
>    communication. This will address the "large clipboards" issue.

 Here I'd just like to mention that the INCR transfers can use very large data 
chunks, so I don't think there's any "large clipboards" issue in the most 
common case. It might make sense in case the two clients are on the same host 
and X is remote though.

>
> o. The library will fallback to the oldstyle X11 protocol if the
>    dbus connection failed. This way it isn't necessary to let
>    dbus serve on tcp/ip or to open ports. If both processes
>    aren't on the same host, it will use the current (working)
>    implementation.
>
> o. A clipboard manager will, using the new Xfixes extensions,
>    catch clipboards that will be lost if the selection-owner
>    gets destroyed. That same clipboard manager will persist
>    the clipboard when the session is about to get shutdown.
>
> o. Whether or not to support a clipboard history is an option or a
>    plugin for that clipboard manager.

 These two points are nothing new.

>
> o. The clipboard manager can also function as a hybride between
>    old X11 applications and newer applications. The clipboard
>    manager can, for example, add the "x-extension/dbus" target and can
>    provide a service that will deliver the data if a newer application
>    wants to receive the data using that channel.
>
> I attached two dia diagrams. You can view them using the app "dia" which
> is available here: http://dia.sf.net. They might be incomplete or
> inaccurate or whatever. And no there's not really anything done yet
> (except a very basic sample application using the new XFixes events
> related to clipboard handling).

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 KDE Developer