Comment 192 for bug 11334

You are correct in your statement, if you just read the bug description,
there is almost no mention about xserver-xorg. The idea that the
specification should change (which means modifying xserver-xorg
behavior) only appears in last comments. Some users speaks like if this
has always been THE solution.

However, at the very first beginning, there was already a specification
so any apps that is closed can register it's clipboard content, so the
clipboard don't get lost once this application is closed.

However, most developers and users don't like this specification,
because it's not how clipboard works on windows and Mac for instance.
Added to the difficulty level to fix this, the reticence of upstream
developers is one of the first reason why this bug still exist and is
still annoying.

Therefore even if everybody claims to have THE solution, it's more
basically a war between two opinions :

1. All applications should comply with clipboard specification.
2. Xserver-xorg should improve and clean up his clipboard (and drop.. or
dratically change his "Selection" methods, that many developers love and
used since the beginning of xserver-xorg so it won't interfere with the
basic features of clipboard.)

Each of these idea is insane, as it requires a lot of work, because
xserver-xorg is not a brand new project, the quantity of people and
projects that relies on it is montruous.

Of course, as you said, if one day xserver-xorg decide to attack idea
#2, they will work with freedesktop to create a new specification.

However your last statement is wrong, there is a bug report for many
applications concerning this, you can all find a list of fixed and
unfixed bug reports in the launchpad bug description. I actually was the
one who managed to merge a ton of bugs all about this issue 1 year ago,
and after reading them all, I found reference to the specification in
one of them, and therefore I made sure that every important projects
(such as evolution, firefox, etc.) was aware of this, by opening a bug
report in their bug tracking system, and adding a reference to this in
the launchpad bug report description.

And of course anybody can report this bug to any other upstream project
that is not already listed in the description. That means searching for
the bug tracking system of the said application on Google, subscribe
there, search if the bug is not already reported, and if not, report a
new bug, and finally, take the address of the bug and add it to the
launchpad bug description.

Unfortunately, once I made that for all the most important projects, the
bug almost got only users complaining, but nobody wiling to take a few
minutes to verify if they could improve the bug report by adding their
own applications if they also have the bug. The description almost
didn't change for more than one year.

However if you look at the bug description, you'll notice that it's
fixed in most GNOME applications, and all future xulrunner applications
(firefox, thunderbird, sunbird, etc.).

I'm not expert enough to have my opinion on what should be done. Idea #1
and #2 seems to both have many good and bad sides.

Saïvann

On 2010-02-20 04:42, Jackflap wrote:
> Saïvann : It's not only up to xserver-xorg to fix this. There is an
> independent Freedesktop specification outlining how the clipboard works.
> It says clearly that all applications, when quitting should export the
> clipboard contents to the global clipboard.
>
> xserver-xorg actually adheres to the specification properly. It's
> actually everything else which are behaving incorrectly (a couple of
> them actually already work properly). So I wouldn't say that it's up to
> xserver-xorg to break the spec and fix this.
>
> If anything, maybe the spec should be improved, then xserver-xorg will
> be obliged to fix the behaviour. However I never felt technically
> comfortable enough to start a discussion on the Freedesktop mailing list
> since I don't feel I understand the underlying issues well enough.
>
> That being said, if the Canonical usability decided to focus on the
> clipboard for a release, the absolute bare-minimum that they would do
> would be to correct the behaviour of all applications installed by
> default. This would be a massive improvement already. They would
> probably also work with the Freedesktop spec in order to improve it (as
> they did with the notification area and are doing with the application
> indicators). Who knows, with any luck they could improve the clipboard
> beyond how it is implemented in Windows/Mac.
>
> One thing that stands out to me, is that there are no launchpad bugs for
> each independent application linked to this one. Someone should really
> go and find/submit the related bugs and link them to this one.
>