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Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard?

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On 13/04/2020 20:51, Eli the Bearded wrote:
> In comp.os.linux.x, Charles Lindsey <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk> wrote:
>> When I started using Ubuntu on 386 (yech!) architectures, I started modifying
>> GTK to use it properly. My mistake then was to use a 32-bit version of Ubuntu
>> when all the rest of the world was turning to 64-bit versions, so although I
>> made my 32-bit version available, I don't think anybody used it. Now I have
>> moved to 64-bit Ubuntu, I am still running my 32-bit version on it.
> 
> You don't seem to have made the source code for your changes public,
> which hinders other people using it. I'm not going to download random
> library files and use them, but source code I might.

No, and my webpage explains why. The code is full of dreadful hacks and of 
itself is not the basis for an orderly extension to GTK, which would need to be 
based on a much later version of GTK. So I did not want to create a fork which 
people might expand in all sorts of ways and which would have no future.

I put out the code just so people could try it and, if they liked it, could put 
pressure on the GTK developers to take it seriously. It failed in that regard 
because nobody nowadays uses 32-bit Linux on desktops. Somewhere on my list of 
Things to Do is to recompile it for 64-bit Linux, but even that would not be 
easy because you will always find places where you cast a pointer to some size 
of integer, and you will find that more recent versions of gcc add extra code to 
detect "Stack Smashing", which is fine but exceedingly difficult to debug if it 
catches you out,

Moreover the inside of gtk is a dog's dinner, and the developers seem more 
intent on rushing ahead with non-backwards-compatible "improvements" and are now 
pushing forward with GTK-4 when the world has hardly absorbed the change from 
GTK-2. QT made a much better job of maintaining backwards compatibility, but the 
world seems to have decided that GTK is the future :-(.

On top of that, the secondary selection, and the ability to create additional 
selections (which is very useful if used wisely) is an X-Windows feature. It 
does not map well onto Microsoft Windows or onto Wayland.
> 
>> So I refer you to http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~lindsec/secondary-selection.html
>> where you will find a short video (it was my first attempt at creating such a
>> video, so excuse its clunkiness) plus a full description of what it is
>> all about.

Look at my documentation of how I borrowed the Motif implementation of using the 
secondary selection; it is, and has to be, pretty complicated if you want it to 
work between different windows running different applications, and all running 
under different Window Managers.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At my New Home, still doing my own thing-----------
Tel: +44 161 488 1845                         Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl@clerew.man.ac.uk      Snail: 40 SK8 5BF, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5

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Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? Javier <javier@invalid.invalid> - 2020-04-06 19:19 -0500
  Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2020-04-07 02:10 +0000
    Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? Javier <javier@invalid.invalid> - 2020-04-07 07:49 -0500
      Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2020-04-07 15:12 +0000
        Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? Javier <javier@invalid.invalid> - 2020-04-07 15:13 -0500
  Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? F Russell <fr@random.info> - 2020-04-07 02:48 +0000
    Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? T <T@invalid.invalid> - 2020-04-06 21:41 -0700
      Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2020-04-13 00:49 +0000
        Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2020-04-13 09:18 +0100
  Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? Charles Lindsey <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk> - 2020-04-13 19:07 +0100
    Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2020-04-13 19:51 +0000
      Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? Charles Lindsey <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk> - 2020-04-14 21:00 +0100
        Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2020-04-14 22:13 +0100
        Re: What is the XA_SECONDARY clipboard? Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> - 2020-04-15 08:16 -0400

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