[Xquartz-dev] fb / rootless crash bugs

[Nathaniel Gray]

On Dec 5, 2007 2:29 PM, Greg Parker <gparker at apple.com> wrote:
> On Dec 5, 2007, at 11:36 AM, Nathaniel Gray wrote:
> >
> > As for alternative window managers, well, other window managers are
> > already out in the cold.  They can't interleave windows with native
> > windows and generally don't behave naturally on OS X.  But this is not
> > an either-or thing -- other window managers can use the traditional
> > code paths while OpenQuartzWM (the shiny new open-source version of
> > quartz-wm ;^) can use the Composite path.
>
> Other WMs may behave unnaturally, but they *do* work. I bet you'd hear
> a lot of screaming if we threatened to take them away.

I don't know, I bet you'd hear a small handful of users screaming
(though I'm sure they'd scream loudly!).  I bet it'd be considerably
less than the (justified) screaming we've heard about spaces-related
bugs, windows not raising, wrongly-styled window decorations, and all
the other window management related bugs that pop up because we have
to fake a parallel version of the Aqua window manager.

> We really don't want to keep both Rootless and something that replaces
> it; that's just asking for trouble down the road when one side doesn't
> get enough testing.

Ok, just drop rootless.  If you want to run a different WM you
probably want it in fullscreen anyway since it won't work properly
with Aqua windows, and you can use xnest for that.

Bah.  The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that trying to
allow non-native window managers is just a waste of brain-cycles.  Mac
OS X is not X11.  The goal should be to seamlessly support X11
*applications* not X11 desktop environments.

> > Another thought worth considering -- should we perhaps be writing a
> > composite manager *instead* of (or in addition to) a window manager?
> > Existing window managers are OK at handling X windows, they just don't
> > know about compositing with the other Aqua windows on the OS X
> > desktop.  Maybe writing a native compositer could solve that.
>
> That's the part I'm not sure about. I don't know whether using a
> composite-unaware window manager together with a composite manager
> works in practice. I also don't know what happens if you try to use a
> window manager that *does* use composite together with a composite
> manager (which is what happens if we use composite in the server for
> windows and a user uses some-random-wm on top). They might conflict
> while trying to take over control of top-level windows.

Doctor, it hurts when I do that...  ;^)

Cheers,
-n8

-- 
>>>-- Nathaniel Gray -- Caltech Computer Science ------>
>>>-- Mojave Project -- http://mojave.cs.caltech.edu -->