Re: clipboard & klipper in X11 terminal

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 03 February 2006 11:57 am, you wrote:
> Ethan Merritt a =C3=A9crit :
> >> we should comply with ICCCM conventions,
> >> explained in the previous links.
>
> You're right. The first link ( http://www.kdedevelopers.org/blog/280
> ) explains that klipper used to behave that way, but changed later

I see.  So klipper is deliberately not following the standard.
Well, so much for solving problems on our end through strict
standards compliance.

> Yeah, they may have dropped the best solution for reasons that are
> not true now, but finally it's not that hard to satisfy klipper needs
> with "TIMESTAMP"... In any case, your patch seems to work too.

I am afraid it may be messier than that.  The blog entry, and the
other entries it points to, document that klipper has been broken
in different ways in different versions of KDE.  Furthermore it will
change again in 3.5.* and probably break things in new ways.
So I am afraid that nothing we do will fix it for all versions of=20
KDE, and I don't have a clue what similar problems lurk under
Gnome or other desktops.

I have no objection to exporting TIMESTAMP, as in your patch.
But I think we should also keep the limitation of one-copy-per-export
in place, because we already know that failing to do this can
eat up the CPU entirely if the app on the other end is badly
written.

I predict the effect of this will be that if you are running klipper
then the only way to transfer a plot pixmap is through klipper.
Only one copy is allowed, and klipper will ask for it first before
anyone else can. But if you are *not* running klipper, then you
can copy-and-paste that one copy directly to another app.
Since apparently the current (3.4.2) klipper is also broken in
the presence of either Gimp or OOffice, my guess is that many
people using graphics will disable klipper.

=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA