Re: StepBox v1 - Yet another GNUstep window manager

[Chris B. Vetter]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 23:03:37 -0400
"Yen-Ju Chen" <yjchenx@hotmail.com> wrote:
[...]
>   Yes, we do need a GNUstep specification for window manager.

Yes and no.
There's no need for another set of Atoms that use confusing language to
describe a certain facility.

GNUstep already has a small hand-full of specific Atoms, though I do not
know whether they are used (inside GNUstep) whenever possible or needed.

On the other hand, X11 itself provides quite a few predefined Atoms,
while there's a certain standard (more like a "everyone agrees on a
certain use of Atoms" standard) plus there's the fabled EWMH (which I'm
not sure even Havoc completely understands, but that's besides the
point).

So, yes, there needs to be an agreement, but no, there do not need to be
new specifications.

>   I plan to make StepBox use as many GNUstep classes as possible,
>   such as NSColor, NSFont, NSStringDrawing, NSBezierPath, etc.

Huh? You're planning of using AppKit?

[...]
>   loop). Since window managers for GNUstep are emerging now,
>   it would be nice to have a good discussion about the boundary among
>   window manager, workspace (GWorkspace) and file manager
>   (GWorkspace). StepBox has sort-of minimal functions of window

That depends on the current implementation or rather, the implementation
you have in mind.

If you do want to have a minimalist window manager, you'll have to agree
on some kind of communicatin between the WM, the WsM and the FM.
DO and Notifications come to mind.

>   manager. It supports resizing, moving, workspaces, iconified into
>   root menu (not real icon on the screen), and configure. That's all.
>   If I can solve the problem of menu (require GNUstep specification)
>   and window order, I think that's all we always ask.

As far as I can tell, GNUstep-based applications handle window order on
their own, that is, the back-end does.
So you only have to worry about legacy windows (ie. when they pop up
"subwindows" somewhere) but usually (and IMHO) you can just ignore it
because you do not have to worry about disappearing menus here ;-) 
Which means, all you have to make sure is that your WM keeps track of
the association between the GNUstep- application and its menu(s).

-- 
Chris