Client API philosophy

[Alan Griffiths]

On 10/11/14 03:31, Daniel van Vugt wrote:
>
> Sounds like a response to one of my merge proposals. So please put
> arguments in the code reviews... 

There's a good reason to discuss this outside of a specific code review:
we need to agree the "big picture".

There is an apparent disagreement about the approach to window
management policy and that affects the review of any and all MPs in this
area.

I've always understood the intent to be that Mir enables shells (in
general and specifically unity8) to implement policies about how things
should be presented. It is far easier for a shell to provide a policy
around, say "menus" if it is asked to "show a menu" than if it is asked
for a window, then asked to "parent" it, then asked to position it, etc.
With this approach there is never any point at which the server knows
what the client intends.

If we intend to push the presentation policy out to the client toolkits
then they will provide inconsistent (a.k.a. incorrect) policy
implementations. (Especially if, as we should hope, there are multiple
shells written using the Mir library that implement policies differently.)