Bug#512401: general: Java, Tk and Tkinter applications broken in Metacity window manager

[Miguel Filgueiras]

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for your messages.

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder at gmail.com> wrote:
> This looks like the same bug as <http://bugs.debian.org/340725>, so
> I'm merging them optimistically.

Yes, it seems exactly the same problem. What is described by
Tim Cutts ("We have a number of Tcl/Tk apps...") in

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=340725#37

is the original problem I had here.

The fact that raise is just a hint and not assured to work
is annoying: this means we cannot rely on it for making
sure the user will be aware of windows that got hidden.
So it seems we need to check if the window is in fact raised
and if not create a new one (hopefully at the top of the
existing ones) with a message... This quite messy.

> 
> The good news is, upstream[1] seems to have a fix:
> 
> | Allow explicit raises from same client, not just same app
> |
> | Here's a patch that takes the approach I proposed. As compared to
> | Olivier's patch:
> |
> |  - It works even for clients that don't set WM_CLIENT_LEADER
> |    (WM_CLIENT_LEADER will only be set for apps that support session
> |    management.)
> |
> |  - It affects only this particular check and not all use of
> |    meta_window_same_application(); this means that it won't cause
> |    regressions for applications that have intentionally split
> themselves |    into mutliple separate window groups.
> |
> |    (For this particular case, we can assume that an application
> |    sophisticated enough to intentionally use multiple window groups
> is |    either not going to XRaiseWindow(), or is only going to
> |    XRaiseWindow() when appropriate; there's no point in trying to
> keep |    such an application from stepping on its *own* toes.)
> 
> If you find a chance to test the patch, that would be excellent.

I'm willing to help but could you please explain how to get
the patch and how to install it?

> Thanks for reporting it.

And thanks for your work on it!
Miguel