[RFC] Draft for a compositing manager specification

[Martin Gräßlin]

Resending as kwin and plasma mailinglists think that 200k is too large for a 
mail. The "attachment" can be found in [2]

Hi,

Pleas note: crossposting to kwin, compiz and plasma development lists. Please 
keep all lists CCed.

Attached you can find a very first draft for a compositing manager 
specification. It is currently based upon the KWin/Plasma interaction 
specified in the windoweffects namespace[1]. I basically just renamed all _KDE 
prefixes to _NET_CM. 

I want that in the end this becomes a new freedesktop.org specification to be 
used in addition to the EWMH specification. As I am not sure if all composited 
window managers are interested in such a specification I decided to discuss 
this idea first with kwin, compiz (as they implement our proprietary hints) 
and plasma, our most important stakeholder. The result of the discussion 
should be proposed as a joint draft from both compiz and kwin to 
freedesktop.org. I consider each and every of those hints as optional. So a 
window manager implementing none of the hints would be fully compliant.

Even if the attached draft is tainted to the current KWin naming and hints, it 
does not mean that this has to become the standard. I am very open to do 
changes to our code and also implement hints specified by compiz or other 
window managers.

I am aware that normally specifications are written in docbook. Unfortunately 
I don't know docbook at all, but I know LaTeX therefore I wrote the draft in 
LaTeX. Attached you find the tex document and a compiled pdf.

If someone has an idea how to collaborate on the document, please tell me. My 
only idea so far is to setup a special repository on gitorious.

Looking forward to your comments.

Regards
Martin Gräßlin


[1] 
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/plasma/windoweffects.cpp?view=markup 
and http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/plasma/windoweffects.h?view=markup
[2] http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2010/08/compositing.pdf.tar.gz
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