Developer focus for Fedora workstation

[Adam Batkin]

On 08/19/2014 04:47 PM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
>...
> In that particular case, I'm not sure that it's only a matter of designer
> input, but rather of manpower for developers initiated in the arcane of
> window management.

I've been looking through a lot of bugs (both on the Gnome BZ and from 
my own use) involving multiple monitors, workspaces, window stacking and 
focus. I think I know what the problem is: There is no specification. No 
one has fully thought out how it *should* work, so there's no way to 
tell if something is working properly. Is something a bug, or just how 
it happens to work, and most people are satisfied enough (or know that 
complaining is more work than dealing with an inconvenient UX)?

If you wander through the Gnome BZ you will see a ton of things like "I 
think it makes sense that the window focus should do X when you close a 
window like this..." and someone else saying "okay here's a patch". This 
stuff is complex enough that it shouldn't just evolve over time through 
a series of Bugzilla tickets. And you should be able to understand the 
[intended] behavior without having to read all of the code or look 
through the history of every BZ.

Proposal:
Let's come up with a specification ("list of rules") for how "we" would 
like these things to work (window stacking and focus, and how that 
interacts with multiple monitors and multiple workspaces). This includes 
different configuration parameters - both things exposed through a UI 
somewhere and things that may be hidden - that can affect the behavior.

Once that's done, it will be possible to see if the implementation 
matches what was intended, and if there's a bug, it can be fixed more 
easily than someone posting a random patch to a BZ saying "hey I came up 
with a better behavior for X" and everyone trying to figure out how that 
fits into the bigger scheme of things.

(why Fedora Workstation and not Gnome upstream for this conversation? 
IMHO our goals are quite different than Gnome's, plus I suspect that 
there are resources lurking around here that may have the bandwidth 
and/or skills to accomplish some of these things and further Fedora and 
Red Hat's goals)

-Adam Batkin