From cubranic at stat.ubc.ca  Tue Jun 12 22:50:34 2012
From: cubranic at stat.ubc.ca (Davor Cubranic)
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 13:50:34 -0700
Subject: [Rd] x11 icon and class
In-Reply-To: <4FD0FB6D.1090005@emory.edu>
References: <4FD0FB6D.1090005@emory.edu>
Message-ID: <CC98295C-F90A-47D6-80A7-16AF82FFEEDB@stat.ubc.ca>

On 2012-06-07, at 12:05 PM, Philip Johnson wrote:

> The X11 device driver does not provide the X window manager with an icon (_NET_WM_ICON) or, under some circumstances, with a class (WM_CLASS). This hinders usability under the new stable version of Ubuntu, which has a (new) user interface centered around icons.
> 
> [...]
>  2) WM_CLASS (for reasons unclear to me, previously WM_CLASS was only set #ifndef USE_Xt)

A few comments in the bug database give a hint why this is conditional (http://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=14588):

(1) "resources are only handled in the Xt case" (comment #1)
(2) "Still no explanation as to why Xt is not used, and this should be conditional on that case." (comment #3)

Now that GUI libraries typically don't rely on Xt any more (e.g., Gtk), but WM_CLASS (and possibly other resources) are still used by window managers, it arguably makes sense for the X11 driver to always set this property.

Davor



[Rd] x11 icon and class
Davor Cubranic