Re: proposed addition to EWMH: _NET_WM_NORMAL_GEOMETRY

On 7/28/07, Mark Tiefenbruck <[email protected]> wrote:
> > This is a poor example.  Surely you can do better than this....  Window
> > managers should be able to run indefinitely, just as the X server.
>
> Seriously? Do you maintain a window manager? I guess we might as well
> remove SIGSEGV from the kernel. It's a paragon of uselessness.
>
> Whether or not a window manager SHOULD be able to run indefinitely is
> irrelevant. Sometimes crashes do happen. Sometimes security issues
> arise due to software that wasn't even written when you wrote your
> window manager (e.g. a font or image library changing its code). These
> problems aren't going away any time soon.
>
> That brings up another example. Suppose the window manager crashes,
> or, if you prefer, the user kills the window manager. You can't
> restore the windows in this situation because you don't know your
> internal state is reliable, among other reasons. If you haven't been
> keeping the _NET_WM_NORMAL_GEOMETRY hint up to date, that information
> is lost.
>
> Even if I grant that it never happens to users, it does happen to
> developers and testers. We have maximized windows, too.

If crashing is a big concern for you, you could use a private window
property to save that state and restore it after the crash.  That
doesn't need any standard defined.