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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: visibility?
From:       Peter_Åstrand <altic () lysator ! liu ! se>
Date:       2000-03-19 19:53:13
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Hello. I'm the author of Busycursor, and I'm really happy about your
interest in this issue. 

Additionally, I think it would be nice if both Gnome and KDE could find a
solution to this problem. 

>> I saw another way to get a clue about which app is behind a window
>> in scwm:  Use LD_PRELOAD when starting a program to load a library
>> that overrides XCreateWindow() and sets a property with the pid 
>> whenever a window is opened.
>> I guess, depending on preferences, you would call this either really 
>> cool or really ugly... 

>Sounds like a good idea to me. Does it always work properly in scwm ?
>If so, I think we should use it. We could add a line to the desktop
>files of apps that are 'compliant' (set WM_COMMAND) to say they
>work and use this for the rest.

Using WM_COMMAND is not a reliable solution, IMHO, because so many things
can change it. Starting an X-app from a script, for example, gives no clue
about the WM_COMMAND to kicker etc. 

This weekend, I've been testing the LD_PRELOAD approach. It seems to work
very well, actually. I've made some changes to the SCWM source, and also
hacked a tool that can be used for tracing the launch. 

The use of the process PID has no value, IMHO, because of the shell-script
issue. It's better to set an uniq environment variable which can be used
the trace which new windows are created from the launched process.
Roughly, one do:

XALF_LAUNCH_ID=4017 xlock

and waits for this window property to appear. 

I'v put together some comments on my webpage:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~altic/xalf/. There you can also find some
sources. Comments are appreciated. 

/Peter Åstrand <altic@lysator.liu.se>

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