Re: Backend <-> GUI Library Interaction

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 7 Nov 2006, at 08:11, Christopher Armstrong wrote:

> Hi
>
> Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> > > That's interesting, I thought the only way a window could change  
> > > window
> > > levels was by the setwindowlevel: message.
> >
> > I thought the same until I checked.  The documentation suggested  
> > that behavior but was not completely explicit, so I looked at the  
> > X backend code to confirm it.
> > The other interpretation (that ordering of windows relative to  
> > each other only worked for windows in the same level) seems a bit  
> > more intuitive to me.
> >
> > It actually might be worth checking what MacOS-X actually does,  
> > and consider changing the GNUstep behavior if it does it the other  
> > way.
> There seems to be a little debate about this one (re: message from  
> Sheldon Gill). I'll have to dig a bit deeper on this, but I think  
> the MacOSX notes are ambigious too (IIRC).

Well, in answering your question about the gui/backend interaction in  
GNUstep, Sheldon has just said how he thinks it *should* behave  
rather than how it *does* behave.  If you want to 'fix' the windows  
backend to work better with the gui now, you need to implement the  
actual behavior rather than a potential future behavior.

However, his idea of how it should behave is perfectly reasonable ...  
and I would probably support moving to it if (and only if) it's the  
way MacOS-X behaves ... once we have checked what the impact/breakage  
of changing behavior would be and if we got consensus/majority in  
favour of changing.  Perhaps very few apps actually depend upon the  
existing behavior and changing would be pretty painless.