Comment 4 for bug 967189

Well it seems things are not so straightforward after all. I ran a series of tests using the xcursor program I wrote to demonstrate bug #960191 under a vanilla X "desktop" comprising just an xterm, launched with "xinit" rather than "startx".

Results of tests:

1. No window manager at all - pointer inherited, as it should be.
2. twm running - pointer NOT inherited.
3. xfwm4 running - pointer inherited, as it should be.

1. is good news for the X11 stack, it means it is not as broken as I thought it might be.
2. is very troubling indeed, but since time is important we will move on.
3. is equally disturbing, cos it implies that it is an unholy combo of some desktop service programs, like xfconfd and brethren, that is messing up pointer inheritance.

When the full xfce desktop and all services is running, pointer inheritance doesn't work. When only xfwm4 is running, pointer inheritance does work.

The reason all this matters is that you don't get startup notifications or the ability to change your pointer theme unless and until windows inherit the pointer from their parents. And at the moment at least, under xfce in 12.04 this is all very much broken.