Stormy Peters: What should the GNOME Foundation accomplish in 2010?

Stormy Peters: What should the GNOME Foundation accomplish in 2010?

Since most distributions ship Firefox as the default browser for Gnome they are shipping a broken clipboard implementation. Sure if you just use 'Gnome' applications then everything is great, but that is almost never the default.

Under the X clipboard protocol, 'copying' marks the clipboard as owned/provided by the source client, but nothing is copied until you paste and the destination client requests the contents. The major benefit of this is that the source client can offer multiple formats but only generate and transfer them to the server as needed. The downside, as you've seen, is that pasting does not work after the source client exits. It may appear to work when GNOME Terminal is the source, but that is because all Terminal windows are now owned by the same client process.

The only way I can see to solve this is for the server to request all source formats immediately and then respond to paste requests itself. This could be very inefficient in the case of complex formats, particularly if client and server are on different systems.