The issues that arose over the six or seven years were various and
particular to each application that some customer was dependent upon.
One class of problems you could describe as a clash between window
managers, Windows and X . This could easily occur for modal popup
windows, override redirect, always on top(Windows) and just the general
problem of trying to maintain focus in various focus policies that might
conflict between the two management styles. Focus fights were fun to
watch...
Joe Krahn wrote:
billh wrote:
Any discussion of internal vs external window management cannot take
place without acknowledging the fact that we are talking about
XWindows operating within another window system, Cygwin/X. The
immediate fact here is that any action that a window manager takes
that is synchronous to the actions of the clients, such as on an
xterm resize, when the window manager may inforce an incremental
sizing based on the character width or heighth has to be handled in
the window proc of the X server running as a Windows client,
otherwise the sequence of events cannot be the same as in a native X
Windows environment. In the case of window resizing, the first order
solution has the window being resized to any arbitrary size by the
Windows window system, and then a second event where an external
window manager would resize the window to a size based on window
hints registered with the X Window system. Though this can happen
very quickly, there are always side effects typically in older
programs that are perhaps more reliant on past behavior of X and even
in some cases certain window managers.
Okay, I'll fess up. I used to work for WRQ on the ReflectionX
server. We found that in fact there were financial reasons, meaning
enough customers, to support both approaches. Some customers wanted
a more Windows centric look and feel and some needed for
compatibility reasons an X window manager.
I'm not trying to discuss Win32 WM-proxy versus a true X Window
Manager. I'm simply comparing how the Win32 WM is implemented. I think
most people would prefer using the Win32 WM, if there were no
compatibilty problems. (BTW: what types of compatibilyt problems were
there?)
What I am aiming toward is Windows-managed windows, but proxied in a
way that works more like a native X window manager. This means that
most of the WndProc handling needs to be handled by "Window Manager"
code. That's why I suggested WndProc Hooking.
I ported GWM to our environment and my associate Kyle went through
the ICCCM documents and made our Windows management mode honor all of
that documents guidelines for window management. This gave us both
modes at the flip of a switch in the control interface gui. For a
commercial product, we could justify both.
My idea is that WndProc hooking can allow you to turn the internal WM
on or off by adding/removing WndProc hooks (or possibly internal
"hooks".)
I'm just suggesting that using the external WM approach will simplify
the code; it's rather messy right now.
THings may have changed, but i tend to doubt it.
PS
This is offered in the spirit of openness. I am not saying that you
should 'go commercial' for your X in Windows needs. Actually I am
currently working on a Linux on Windows product that has its own X
Server port via a frame buffer driver. Very cool! Don't port your
Linux code, run it natively!!!
Joe Krahn wrote:
What is the history of internal versus external Win32 WMs? It seems
that Cygwin/X is favoring the internal WM, even though the external
WM is a better fit to the X server design.
I was looking into adding some NET_WM/EWMH features (mainly icons
for now), and realized that most things have to be done differently
on an internal WM, meaning extra work making non-reusable code.
The current external WM is implemented using a proper X extension,
which might be the source of some problems with the external WM.
Maybe an efficient solution for the external WM would be to use
WndProc hooks, so that window message passing can be done natively
instead of through an X extension.
Joe
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