Top-most windows

[Deron Johnson]

So, after the recent flurry of e-mail on this topic, where do we
stand?

I don't think that the grab/raise/ungrab approach is a viable
candidate. It places a giant lock around something that shouldn't be
locked.

Drawing to root window is not viable either. Switching the root window
to be double-buffered on-the-fly would require major architectural
change to OpenGL, and I'm not entirely sure that all extant hardware
could support it.

Reparenting top-level windows to be children of a pseudo-root window
has proven itself to be an approach fraught with peril. I haven't
heard of anyone on this list who is in favor of the hacks I had to do
to get this to work, or who has suggested cleaner ways to work around
the problems.

The topmost window seems to me to be the cleanest of the approaches
mentioned so far but it begs the question as to how general should it
be and how will window managers deal with that generality.

I have even considered the idea of using a user-managed screen saver
(that is, a screen saver that the user draws to) but this would mean
that LG could not leverage the X screen saver.

(Are there any other proposals which I have not mentioned in this
summary?)

What LG really needs is some way to tell the X server that it is the
only one who is going to be drawing to the screen and don't let any
other windows get in the way (except for the X screen
saver). Something sort of like the DGA extension.  Perhaps trying to
fit things into a window-like model is too complex because it
introduces new paradigms that the window manager must deal
with. Perhaps having a simple concept like "I am the composite
manager. I rule the screen real estate" is a simpler, more direct
concept.