Bug 2117

Summary:	Request for an extension to avoid RevertToNone
Product:	xorg	Reporter:	Elijah Newren <newren>
Component:	* Other	Assignee:	Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	high	CC:	alan.coopersmith, erik.andren, roland.mainz
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	x86 (IA32)
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Elijah Newren 2004-12-20 11:08:36 UTC

I'm afraid I'm not sure of the appropriate component; my apologies.

This request stems from http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125492.  If a
focus window becomes not viewable, then X states that the new focus window
depends on the revertto argument.  If revertto is Parent, the focus reverts to
the parent (or the closest viewable ancestor) and the new revertto value is
taken to be None.  However, if the Parent also becomes unviewable, then the
focus reverts to nothing which means that window manager keybindings break.

For now, we've added a hack to detect when no window becomes focused and
manually focus a window (our dummy "no_focus_window") so that keybindings don't
stop working.  As Havoc says in comment 9
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125492#c9) of the gnome bug, "An X
extension to let us specify "revert to some specified window" (with side effect
that RevertToNone will never be used) would be welcome"

Comment 1 Havoc Pennington 2004-12-20 21:15:04 UTC

The impact of this bug is small with the hack in metacity to always immediately
set the focus if it gets set to None somehow, but without that window manager
hack the impact is large since keyboard-only users (disabled users, etc.) can
lose all ability to control the computer.

I've been trying to think of how an app could depend on RevertToNone
existing/working (since such an app would break in the presence of either the
metacity hack or changing X to never use RevertToNone) but I can't really think
of a scenario. Does anyone remember why RevertToNone exists in the first place?

Comment 2 Erik Andren 2006-04-22 18:21:07 UTC

Flagging as an enhancement.

Comment 3 Daniel Stone 2007-02-27 01:24:52 UTC

Sorry about the phenomenal bug spam, guys.  Adding xorg-team@ to the QA contact so bugs don't get lost in future.

Comment 4 Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia 2011-09-24 17:21:39 UTC

This bug has been sitting untouched for a long time.  If this is still a problem, please reopen, but I suspect it won't get much love.  Patches welcome... =/

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