Re: master 4b98a79a50: Improve X event timestamp tracking

[Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>]

On Sun, 2022-08-07 at 11:51 +0800, Po Lu wrote:
> Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org> writes:
> 
> > You are not the sole X port maintainer.
> 
> etc/MAINTAINERS says otherwise.

I've contributed code all over this project and never been limited by
MAINTAINERS. This file does not grant you the authority to
arbitrarily reject contributions that fix long-standing bugs. You're
welcome to make improvements to committed code just like anyone else.
I'd suggest minimizing friction in the future, not blocking useful
work form someone who spent all day debugging this issue.

> I don't buy the argument for having an entire terminal hook, meaningless
> outside X (name one other window system under which it makes sense),
> that is supposed to make x-focus-frame magically work in situations
> where it currently does not.

An "entire terminal hook" is a trivial function pointer. 
Don't you think this is a mountain out of a molehill? What,
precisely, is the resource being consumed by minimizing terminal hook
structure fields? 

Sure, we could have open-coded typecases or inscrutably invocations
of some "force" parameter --- or we could make a generic terminal
operation that clearly and explicitly expresses user intent. It's not
as if the X event timestamp mechanism exists without reason either.
Focus-stealing prevent isn't some "draconian" measure to work around
or a bug in window managers, but instead a way to properly order
events observed in a distributed, asynchronous system.

*In general*, code is cleaner when 1) explicit programmer intent is
expressed (as opposed to "add a force qualifier, because force"), and
2) that programmer intent is communicated without special cases.
You're proposing scrapping a generic mechanism and replacing it with
a special case, and I don't right now see the net benefit.