New clipboard proposal

[Lubos Lunak]

Dne pá 31. prosince 2004 4:22 Philip Van Hoof napsal(a):
> On Thu, 2004-12-30 at 18:11 -0800, John Davidorff Pell wrote:
> > On 30 Dec 2004, at 17:12, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2004-12-30 at 16:03 -0800, John Davidorff Pell wrote:
> > >> btw. History could be added by having some application catch all
> > >> changes to whichever clipboard it is listening to and storing it,
> > >> which  is what your clipboard manager would do anyway.
> > >
> > > I mentioned keeping histories. My exact words where that it could be an
> > > option in the form of a plugin for that clipboard manager. As a matter
> > > of fact there are a few applications today doing this for you. One
> > > example is Klipper. Many people use Klipper. Others don't. Therefor
> > > keeping clipboard history isn't going to be the main purpose.
> > >
> > > Making it easy for applications like Klipper to pop/push and query this
> > > history would be delegated to such a plugin.
> >
> > If the X server kept track of the contents of the clipboard, then
> > klipper would continue to work exactly as it does today, no changes
> > necessary. :-)
>
> yes, however. At this moment are applications like Klipper (gcm) using
> hacks and tricks to do the task for which they are designed. I'd be
> better if they didn't have to perform hacks and tricks to get the job
> done.

 I think these days no hacks or tricks are needed anymore (indeed, that means 
only 'really needed' - there are enough broken apps that just don't happen to 
cooperate nicely without hacks and tricks). XFixes can give notifications 
about clipboard changes. There are proposals for notifying about apps owning 
the clipboard quiting, for limiting the size of the transfers, there are 
mimetypes.

 Which again makes me wonder what exactly you'd like to fix and how. I 
personally find your list of problems and your proposal too vague.

> I've e-mailed with the author of Klipper (Aaron Seigo).

 This must be a misunderstanding. I doubt Aaron Seigo has even touched 
internals of Klipper, let alone being its author. The original author of 
Klipper is Andrew Stanley-Jones, Carsten Pfeiffer used to be the maintainer 
until recently, and Esben Mose Hansen is the current maintainer 
(http://webcvs.kde.org/kdebase/klipper/toplevel.cpp?rev=1.168&view=markup - 
search for 'createAboutData'). I'm actually not sure how much these people 
know about the underlying X details, because they're shielded by the 
high-level QClipboard API. The person fixing the underlying X details usually 
happens to be me.


-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 KDE Developer