Bug#474997: gnome-panel: Window list does not group by process

[Tim Cutts]

On 17-Apr-08, Sven Arvidsson wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 12:21 +0100, Tim Cutts wrote:
> > According to the documnetation for the window list applet, the "Always
> > group windows":  "Select this option to always group windows of the same
> > process under one Window List button".  Unfortunately this isn't what it
> > does; it groups windows according to their window title, as far as I can
> > tell.  It most definitely doesn't group according to process - try
> > running two copies of the following tk script:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Are you sure this isn't a problem with tk or your script? 
> 
> I think window grouping is done by matching WM_CLIENT_LEADER, and only
> falls back to using the window title if it's missing.
> 
> "xprop | grep LEADER" for any of the windows created by your script
> doesn't show any matches.
> 
> I have only tried this on a system running gnome 2.22, but I'm guessing
> it works the same in 2.14.

Thanks for that way of looking for things.  That's useful.  The original
source of this bug report was a user of the program acedb
(http://www.acedb.org, if you really care!)  This program creates a lot
of windows.  In the version of GNOME supplied with sarge, the window
list grouped these windows nicely by database.  Using the same xace
client, but upgrading the desktop to etch, broke this behaviour and the
window list sorts the windows alphabetically.

OK, let's ignore my little tk script, and stick with acedb.
Fortunately, I used to use acedb, so I can reproduce what the user is
seeing.

I can confirm that acedb is setting WM_CLIENT_LEADER correctly, and that
if I run two copies of acedb, each set of windows has a distinct value
of WM_CLIENT_LEADER.  However, the window list still groups them all
together, and sorts the window names alphabetically, with no regard for
the value of WM_CLIENT_LEADER in the sort order.

So there's definitely something wrong here.  I will see if I can
duplicate the issue on a lenny machine.

Regards,

Tim

-- 
Dr Tim Cutts
Informatics Systems Group
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK



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