[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Bug#495373: Bug#495373: Poor support for the xmonad WM; blank windows with the cairo backend

[Yavor Doganov]

Could you please rebuild gnustep-gui with the attached patch?  It
should fix the problem with cairo on your architecture (and all 64bit
architectures, FWIW).  Thanks.

At Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:34:28 +0200,
Michal Suchanek wrote:
> 
> I have no idea what business has GNUstep with window borders. The
> application draws into its window and the window location on the
> screen and decorations are the business of the window manager.

It is a bit difficult to explain.  GNUstep is not just a graphics
toolkit or a simple widget library.  It has somewhat complex
architecture with several layers, and many things are "non-standard"
(compared to what most users expect from X applications) as one of the
design goals is to implement the OpenStep specification.

Here is what upstream says about this specific question:

,----
| For the other problem I may need to explain first, why GNUstep tries
| to determine the window border. In OpenStep it is possible to position
| the contents of a window as well as the window itself, to do this
| reliable we need to know about the border of the window. It even goes
| as far as positioning an unmapped window, where we cannot determine
| the current border. That is why we try to find out about standard
| windows borders when GNUstep starts up.
| 
| For most modern window managers we have code to do this, perhaps we
| need to add an extra bit for window managers that don't reparent a
| window. Here we only get ConfigureNotify events (#22 in the log you
| send), perhaps we could just rely on the border width given there.
`----