[Panel-devel] Plasma and the window manager (Re: KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/plasma)

[Lubos Lunak]

On Saturday 17 of November 2007, Ivan Čukić wrote:
> >  I'm pretty sure I've already told Aaron, but let me repeat for
> > everybody:
> >
> >  When you get some fancy ideas about toplevel windows (and this is bound
> > to
>
> Could you put your directions on the techbase?

 Direction number 1: Whatever you want to do, don't do it.

 That's because in the usual cases, just the window manager and libraries 
should handle it on their own. Moreover, the window manager is responsible 
for handling toplevel windows and usually knows better than applications 
trying to have their own ideas about how things should work.

 Of course, there are also some special cases where this does not apply, but 
those are special cases and I don't know how to create any directions for 
that (they're special after all). Let alone the fact that I wouldn't know how 
to create any useful directions anyway, as being the window manager developer 
doesn't let me see these things the same way like others do - I find things 
either obvious (systray widget is part of the Plasma window, so it obviously 
shouldn't be a toplevel window) or they're kludging around problems, be them 
real or just perceived (usually not understanding what's in the first 
paragraph), so I'm sometimes surprised to see what people actually try to do.

 I would like to have such page though, but it'd probably have to mention 
various things as they turn up. Do you have any specific issues in mind?

> I have one a bit related question - how to tell KWin not to draw shadow for
> a paricular window. The problem with us, Plasma people :), is that
> sometimes we have non-rectangular window (Lancelot, Raptor) and it looks
> awful to have a shadow made by transparent window parts.

 Ok, a nice example of the above :). Transparent window parts should not have 
shadows, so this is obviously a KWin bug that needs to be fixed, instead of 
trying to work it around by some flag. I'll add this problem to the 4.0-TODO 
file.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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