Subject: Re: bug#9181: 24.0.50; Alpha transparency no longer works

From: Luka Novsak <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2011 19:29:15 +0200

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 5:12 PM, David De La Harpe Golden
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> Again, either way, emacs blindly
> setting the property on its parent is the wrong thing.

It's an unelegant hack, to be sure.

> I just suspect
> filing bugs upstream to window managers for the non-propagation at this
> stage is something of a lost cause.

Then there's that.

So unless emacs uses this workaround for now, it will not have
functioning alpha transparency when used in combination with a large
majority of window managers. As I've said, I've reported this upstream
with Openbox, and I suppose users of other wm's will do so when they
upgrade to emacs24, but there are A LOT of non-compliant window
managers out there, and it shouldn't be expected for this to change
any time soon.

Perhaps there should be a push for this to be formally specified in
the EWMH. The proposal for it seems to be many years old, and the
practice widespread, so I don't see why this hasn't happened yet.