jd:/dev/blog - freedesktop

The eggtray problem

jd — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:12:00 +0200

I still don't know why but many GTK+ applications use something called eggtrayicon. As far as I know, eggtrayicon.c is a file written in 2002 by Anders Carlsson which implements the Freedesktop.org system tray procotol for GTK+ applications.

Problem is that this C file is used in dozens of programs and maybe more, and is a bit bugged. I've already send patches for mail-notification and Audacious. pidgin is the first fixed implementation I found and works quite well. Many other applications are probably affected.

That seems to me like a real problem. Multiple copy of bad code instead of using native GTK+ system tray implementation.

So please stop using this bad implementation…

xcb-util 0.3.0 released

jd — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:22:00 +0200

I just released XCB util and announced on XCB xorg-announce lists at Freedesktop.

This version has seen some of the modules totally rewritten, like ICCCM, event, reply or property. It also has a lot more documentation than previous, so I've set up doxygen documentation online.

It was the last step before releasing awesome 3 final… hm hm.

Releasing xcb-util 0.2.1

jd — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:02:00 +0200

This morning I put on my Freedesktop hat and go ahead for a minor release of xcb-util.

This is the third release ever made of xcb-util, 2 years after the first one… It really needed some love.

awesome and XDG base dir spec

jd — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:50:00 +0200

awesome now supports XDG base directory specifications. A step further to join the FDO standards.

EWMH and XRandR

jd — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:48:00 +0100

Today I decided to add some EWMH support to awesome. It now supports a bunch of this extensions quite nicely.

However, while reading the spec and writing the code, it appears that this forces a window manager to behave in only one way: have a poor desktop support, and no multi-head/XRandR/Xinerama support at all.

The main caveats are that in Xinerama/XRandR mode, you'll have only one root window. And the root window is where you must store the NET_WM X properties… So you cannot handle screens in a independant way like awesome does. That's really a shame.

There's also a big problem for window managers like awesome which are happy to draw several desktops at the same time. There's no support for stuff like that.

So far, I think EWMH is nice but is really too narrow-minded for softwares and people who want to think window management in a different way.