Re: XFIXES extension proposal

On Sat, 30 Nov 2002, Keith Packard wrote:

> 2) Selection Tracking
>
> Applications like the KDE 'klipper' monitor selection contents to save
> them and also perform actions based on them.  Right now, this happens by
> having these clients contantly polling the selection.
>
> The proposal is to have a event delivered whenever the selection changes.
>

Oh yes to this one! I rember back in the openlook(XView) days writing a
program to move selections between x and openlook. It was an absolute pain
having to poll it. Which I did every second!

The only problem with the fixes extension will people use it, as they
will have to write the code twice so it supports "legancy" ie not Xfree86
systems. (thinking of selection tracking here)

As kludges exist for some of these fixes, a compatibility library could be
made so people who wrote code in the "new" way, would have some kind of
support on other systems, but still could write things "clean", in the
case of selection tracking, it would do the polling, but return events as
if the XFIXES was there.

James