Hi ftpmaster crew, After some discussion with the GNOME Clipboard Manager's upstream author, we both agree that the best way to current to deal with the RC bugs in the gcm package is to remove it altogether from Debian until freedesktop.org can formalise a new X11 clipboard standard. Thanks in advanced, Andrew "Netsnipe" Lau ----- Forwarded message from Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing@freax.org> ----- Subject: Re: [Gcm-devel] Bug#230821: patch looks ok From: Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing@freax.org> To: gcm-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Cc: Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org>, 230821@bugs.debian.org, Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org>, spitzak@d2.com On Wed, 2004-03-24 at 22:51, Andrew Lau wrote: > Hey guys, > > The reason that I haven't uploaded a fixed version of gcm is because > that it's broken in CVS right now. Try checking out from > anoncvs.gnome.org and attempt to fix the intltool problems currently in > that tree. Regenerating the libtool files only created more errors. I'm > struggling to actually find enough free time to solve all the problems > I'm facing right now, and it seems like GCM is a now an obsolete project > (until the C# version comes out -- months off). > Indeed, The basic concept of gcm is wrong. It's unwise to let an application harvest clipboards unless some more intelligent API in X is created at some point. I know, I created gcm and hell I dislike it a lot. But it's the only way to do it. Therefor I gave up all efforts to build a Clipboard Manager, until a improved Clipboard Mechanism is introduced by for example freedesktop.org AND I find some free time to rebuild the concept around a better mechanism. The current problem is that one application just cannot know when another application gains Clipboard Ownership. Well thats not entirely true, the one application can know it by being clipboard owner at all times. Because ... one application do can know when it looses clipboard ownership. So when the Clipboard Manager looses ownership, it fetches the new clipboard, harvests it and reclaims ownership. It's not nice to do that and basically wrong for the PRIMARY selection to do it this way. For that reason I created a poller-thread (or timer) that will check the PRIMARY selection every xx milliseconds for changes. This is of course ugly. I know that. But it's the only way, at this moment. X should allow any application to know about clipboard-ownership changes. That way a Clipboard Manager could easily be build outside of the scope which X has. Now it's pretty much impossible to do this in a clean way. Added to CC: Bill Spitzak, responsible for the Clipboard specification on freedesktop.org So what I am suggesting is: With a lot regret because I do am proud that a application of which I am maintainer is in Debian: remove the damned gcm package from Debian and talk to the freedesktop.org people to get such an API change in X. Once such changes are available, I am prepared to rebuild the Clipboard Manager concept in any language. -- Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos home: me at freax dot org work: Philip dot VanHoof at cronos dot be http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org ----- End forwarded message ----- -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew "Netsnipe" Lau <http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~alau/> Debian GNU/Linux Maintainer & UNSW Computing Students' Society President - "Nobody expects the Debian Inquisition! Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency!" ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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