Clipboard problems (yes, again)

[Lars Knoll]

> On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 07:22:39AM -0800, Neil Stevens wrote:
> > Come on... if something is buggy, you fix it, you don't run away from it.
> > Hiding buggy things won't get them fixed.

And if you read Seli's mail carefully you'd understood that this is something 
that is _very_ easy to get wrong in KDE apps aswell. This means it could 
easily happen to every developer using the X11 clipboard.

> > And now we have your true motivation.  You're just trying to remove
> > feature to attempt to bully all KDE users into using the clipboard the
> > way *you* want them to, despite the fact that countless KDE users might
> > be perfectly happy with the KDE 2 clipboard behavior.
>
> By this point of the mail I kinda get the idea that, well,
> don't you maybe think that you might just be hurting the
> development process ever so slightly?
>
> Most of Seli's points were really well made. AFAIK there has
> always been a cut off point for feature buggyness beyond which
> applications/features should really be "cut out". This seems
> really quite obvious to me that this is the case as otherwise
> kdenonbeta would be shipped with KDE proper. We are pretty
> close to release and most of the points made were very valid.
>
> mvg,
> Alex who notes that he loves "synchronization" and would really
> like to see Seli's mail "motivate" some fixes to Qt/KClipboard

This is basically almost impossible if you want to follow the standards. 
Qt-2.x apps were almost the only X11 apps doing this wrong. This had to be 
fixed in Qt-3.x (to follow standards and as a lot of people are used to it 
from other toolkits). "selection" and "clipboard" are two separate things. 

What klipper now does is basically evil (considering the way the X11 clipboard 
works) and can put a significant strain on your system (that's where all the 
problems come from). Considering this klipper should probably never have been 
written (even though one might consider it's functionality quite nice). It 
polls the clipboad every second, and in case someone selected some big chunk 
of data, all of this gets sent over the wire, even though he never pasted it 
anywhere.

If you'd followed kde-(core-)devel for the last years you'd have noticed that 
klipper is the _one_ application that always lead to huge problems for the 
KDE desktop as a whole (slowing it down to almost a standstill, etc...). 

Removing the synchronizing "feature" is the least we can do to finally get rid 
of these problems that made so many problems for KDE in the last years (and 
don't forget how many development resources they took we could have used 
better otherwise).

Cheers,
Lars