community Digest, Vol 156, Issue 27, Ideal screen rotation

[Jared Maddox]

> On Fri, 6 Nov 2009 17:22:27 +0000 Rui Miguel Silva Seabra <rms at 1407.org>
> said:
>
>> On Fri, Nov 06, 2009 at 04:40:04PM +0100, Helge Hafting wrote:
>> > Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote:
>> > > On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 01:55:29PM +0100, Helge Hafting wrote:
>> > [...]
>> > >> The software that control rotation need to know if the foreground app
>> > >> should run in landscape, portrait or auto mode. (And perhaps the
>> > >> upside-down variants as well.)
>> > >
>> > > Or, what I think would be the proper way to do it, the application should
>> > > broadcast to dbus that it prefers no rotation, or one of the 4 possible
>> > > rotation states and omnewrotate could listen to such requests and
>> > > not rotate while there is such a message in the bus.
>> > >
>> > Well, you cannot expect every app to have such preferences, this device
>> > runs generic linux apps that aren't made specially for the freerunner.
>> > Now, of course the app loader can do this, similiar to how we already
>> > request the cpu/backlight when launching some apps.
>> >
>> > But there is a problem. The user may switch between several apps with
>> > different rotation needs. (xmahjongg needs landscape, tetris needs
>> > portrait, ...)  How will omnewrotate be notified about this?
>>
>> The proper way is to define a set of DBUS signals.
>>
>> Of course conflicting signals need to be ignored.
>
> no. the proper way is to set properties on your window. this is a display
> system thing. dbus is orthogonal to it. you set properties. you let the wm
> figure out what to do with the active window(s) based on their properties.

Which window property, a 'no resize' flag? Is the property stored by
X, the window manager, or something else? Is the code that does the
rotations in the window manager?