Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!eng.sun.COM!dshr
From: dshr@eng.sun.COM (David Rosenthal)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: DECW$WINMGR Weirdness
Message-ID: <9007031550.AA18335@devnull.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 3 Jul 90 15:44:31 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 23

> You can get a large pannable "root" window.  The problem is that the ICCCM
> doesn't address the problem, it even admits that further work needs to be
> done.  I know work on virtual root window extensions was being done around
> R3 but I don't know anything about what was good/bad about the implementation.
> 
> I know it's simplistic, but something that would help is something
> like a WM_ROOT property placed on client windows that would tell the
> window who its logical root window is.  This type of property would make
> multiple "rooms" pardigms much easier to implement because each room
> could then be a seperate X window.
> 
The work that went on around R3,  largely thanks to Audrey Ishizaki at HP,
implemented something along the lines of a property that let a client
know its logical root.  It turned out that this wasn't enough.  For all sorts
of reasons (I remember problems with events, grabs, etc) we decided that
the only way to really do a pseudo-root was to implement a "chroot()"
extension,  to change the server's idea of a window's root.  Having
the server and the client disagree about what the logical root of
a window is just results in too many problems.  The "chroot()"
extension isn't hard to spec,  but implementing it does affect
quite a lot of the server code.

	David.