Re: Mouse pointer appearance problem

[Fred Kiefer]

Sas wrote:
> It is merely a matter of X-Windows configuration and the environment you
> have. On OSX the WindowServer process itself changes the cursor when the
> active window stops responding for more than 2 seconds. On X-Windows I'm
> sure there is one of the gazillion extensions to do it (or your session
> manager is supposed to do that). WindowMaker doesn't take care of
> changing the cursor's appearance automatically.
> 

I am not sure, if I understood the original request correctly. So let me
try to rephrase it and Andreas may correct me where I am wrong:

We are talking about an application here that performs some potentially
long running background task. The application programmer doesn't want to
set and unset the cursor for this specific action, which would be the
most obvious solution for me. We are also not talking about the case
where an application is stuck in an infinite loop. For the latter case
(infinite loop) there is the _NET_WM_PING extension for X Windows, which
GNUstep partly supports. That way the window manager that supports this
protocol could tell that an application stop to respond to events.

This just leave us with the automatic detection of the case, where X
events still get answered by the application, but where there is a long
ongoing task. I don't see who a programmer could expect GNUstep or the
windows system (or window manager) to handle this case. To both
environments the application seems to be behaving normally.

So what is it that I missed?

Fred