Bug#230821: [Gcm-devel] Bug#230821: patch looks ok

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Wed, 2004-03-24 at 22:51, Andrew Lau wrote:

> Hey guys,
> 
> The reason that I haven't uploaded a fixed version of gcm is because
> that it's broken in CVS right now. Try checking out from
> anoncvs.gnome.org and attempt to fix the intltool problems currently in
> that tree. Regenerating the libtool files only created more errors.  I'm
> struggling to actually find enough free time to solve all the problems
> I'm facing right now, and it seems like GCM is a now an obsolete project
> (until the C# version comes out -- months off).
> 

Indeed,

The basic concept of gcm is wrong. It's unwise to let an application
harvest clipboards unless some more intelligent API in X is created at
some point.

I know, I created gcm and hell I dislike it a lot. But it's the only way
to do it.

Therefor I gave up all efforts to build a Clipboard Manager, until a
improved Clipboard Mechanism is introduced by for example
freedesktop.org AND I find some free time to rebuild the concept around
a better mechanism.

The current problem is that one application just cannot know when
another application gains Clipboard Ownership. Well thats not entirely
true, the one application can know it by being clipboard owner at all
times. Because ... one application do can know when it looses clipboard
ownership. So when the Clipboard Manager looses ownership, it fetches
the new clipboard, harvests it and reclaims ownership. It's not nice to
do that and basically wrong for the PRIMARY selection to do it this way.

For that reason I created a poller-thread (or timer) that will check the
PRIMARY selection every xx milliseconds for changes. This is of course
ugly. I know that. But it's the only way, at this moment.

X should allow any application to know about clipboard-ownership
changes. That way a Clipboard Manager could easily be build outside of
the scope which X has. Now it's pretty much impossible to do this in a
clean way.

Added to CC: Bill Spitzak, responsible for the Clipboard specification
on freedesktop.org


So what I am suggesting is: With a lot regret because I do am proud that
a application of which I am maintainer is in Debian: remove the damned
gcm package from Debian and talk to the freedesktop.org people to get
such an API change in X. Once such changes are available, I am prepared
to rebuild the Clipboard Manager concept in any language.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
work: Philip dot VanHoof at cronos dot be
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org