Re: Improving X selection?

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    My question is this: If I were to change the possible return
    values for the interprogram-paste-function so that it is
    allowed to return a list of strings, and I modified all the
    callers so they could expect a list of strings, and I made the
    whole list get pushed on the kill ring, would such a change
    likely be accepted?

Sure.  That can't do any harm.

It might also be good to install the rest of your change, rewritten to
use that hook:

    Anyone who attempts to interact with a mix of older (xterm for
    instance) and newer (gtk apps) with emacs while doing cut &
    paste operations has undoubtedly noticed the persistent problem
    of never winding up with the selection you actually want (now
    that we have some folks using CLIPBOARD and others using
    PRIMARY). Yes, you can set x-select-enable-clipboard, but all
    that does is invert the set of incorrect text you get back.

    I have just implemented a quick hack (definitely not suitable
    for prime time) to the x-cut-buffer-or-selection-value
    function. This hack observes when there is more than one "new"
    selection and goes ahead and pushes the new ones it isn't
    planning to return to the caller onto the kill ring.

But more people would have to study and try it
before we could decide on that.