Re: patches...

on Thu, Oct 03, 2002 at 10:02:51PM -0400, Greg Alexander wrote:
> 
> I discovered that if I tap on, for example, minisys like ten
> times a second 

10 times a second ! I bet you were good at 'Daley Thomsons Decathlon' ;-)

(sometimes letting the message window stay there for
> the full 5 seconds but other times interrupting it before the message
> even finishes sending) then eventually the message window just pops up
> for the briefest flash and then disappears.  This is caused by
> multiple message records getting put in the queue for the same window.
> (which happens if one message is begun before another finishes)
> The starttime (used for the delayed destruction of the message window)
> is set on the message record at the end of the queue but the text goes
> into the message record at the beginning of the queue.  So I'm also
> attaching a patch against msg.c to automatically destroy messages
> attached to a given client when making a new message for it.
> 
>

I need to have a look at this. Its been a while since I've hacked the
message stuff.
 
> Okay now for a little diatribe about sliders...
> 
> I know this is all cvs pre-alpha but I really really
> don't like the sliders stuff and the associated storage of the
> x-offset in the .mbdock file.  I think my fundamental disagreement is
> with scrollbars themselves -- if it's so frequently-used that i'm
> docking it, i don't want to have to use sliders to get to it!  But
> there are some implementation details -- most specifically if you are
> going to have sliders I still do not want the x offset stored.  I
> always use X in landscape, but there are some things (such as reading
> an ebook) that i prefer to do in portrait due to the shape of my
> hands.  I really liked the '-r' option (right align) but now if i
> manually right-align my stuff then it gets pushed off the side when i
> go portrait.  augh!

Sure, but what happens when you fill the dock up in landscape and then
go to potrait ? Do the apps that would now be offscreen become
inaccessable ? Thats whats the 'slider' button is therefore, so you
can get at them. Feel free to throw me a patch that maybe realigns any
apps on the right after a dock resize ( ie rotation ).

I got rid of the '-r' way of docking as I wanted the user to be able
to freely move apps around to where ever they wanted - just like the
Gnome and KDE panels. Thus I have to record the absolute positions of
the apps.

 
> I want your input...if it were just for me I would just rip out the
> scroll buttons, but since i really like matchbox I would like to make
> my patches generally applicable.  Now that you've presumably had
> sliders for a while, do you still think it's a good idea?  If not,
> let's kill 'em.  But if you really like them then I propose
> reinstating a left/right-align with slider fallback.  

I like the old 'dock split in two' slider too - but *nobody* seemed
to understand what it was/did . That was my problem with it.

>If you have so
> many docked apps that they 'meet in the middle' then it redoes them
> all with sliders the way it is now (in cvs), otherwise it honours the
> right-align flag as it did before.  as a side effect, in no situation
> would it ever store the x offsets in .mbdock -- they would always be
> determined at run-time (if not just to make portrait/landscape
> switches more comfortable).  Seems like the best of both worlds, and a
> more pleasant upgrade path for people who thought mbdock was
> perfect in the v0.3.3 release.
> 
> If I were to make such a patch I think I would also add a 'center'
> hint.
> 
> So...any feedback on what would be the best answer here?
> 

Theres no reason why you cant write your own dock :) Grab the source
of the 0.3.3 one, add your center patch and release that. The dock
apps will still work fine with it. 

  -- Matthew