Re: recent change to yanking behavior of the clipboard

[Po Lu]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> I see no point in sticking to behaviour obsoleted by the operating
>> system, such as storing cut text in the primary selection.  On X, every
>> client has to cooperate with every other client in order to have working
>> cut and paste, and a single client deviating from that is sufficient to
>> bring down the entire deck-of-cards.

> Now I'm lost.  What you say here seems to claim that the change under
> discussion brings Emacs in line with the official/standard protocol.
> Yet that change is very specific to the `CLIPBOARD` whereas I'd expect
> such an official protocol to behave the same for all types of selections.

No, this is something else unrelated to the original change: I'm trying
to coinvince people not to use `select-enable-primary', at least
lightly, and those prior changes you referred to changed the default
value of `select-enable-primary'.  Further down another thread someone
said that was common advice on the internet, which is shocking, since
that amounts to teaching people to break their systems.

> Elsewhere you said that the motivation was one of optimization
> of performance.  Yet Noah's original message points out a change in
> actual behavior rather than mere performance.
>
> I'm having difficulty reconciling those somewhat contradictory facts.
>
> Could someone walk me through step-by-step what happens in one or two cases,
> (e.g. Noah's case, or the "normal" case) explaining what Emacs does and
> why, how the patch affects the outcome and what the ideal behavior would
> be according to the standard protocol?

We don't know what happens in Noah case yet.  He hasn't replied to my
questions.

Thanks.