Windows cannot be focused in xfwm4 while running awn

You might want to look here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/awn/+bug/129606

On the surface, that looks to be entirely unrelated, except that xfwm4 is part of the xfce suite. In my research into the xfce support being built there was no mention of the xfwm bug.

Someone please correct me if I am mistaken.

Do you mean when you click to switch to another application, the focus repeatedly switches between awn and the app until you close awn, or is it something different? My gut tells me that it has something to do with the fact that xfwm4 uses a(n old) fork of libwnck (which they are planning to deprecate and unfork back soon), so it might be a netk-related bug.

By the way, as far as I can tell, it has absolutely nothing to do with my branch - I only touch desktop-file and VFS related code, not window manager code.

To be honest, I'm not sure what *has* focus, except that is not the window I'm clicking. Whenever I attempt to focus a window in this way, the focus tint shows in the window decorations for a fraction of a second and then it's unfocused again. As far as I know, the focus isn't switching rapidly, since clicking does seem to set it for a (very) brief period of time.

This stops when awn does.

@Mark Lee

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the problem had anything to do with your branch. I was under the assumption that the xfce support you were working on would help deal with the xfwm problem. Are Compiz or Beryl still required with your branch?

The libwnck issue seems to be a good lead on this problem....

@Michael Seiler:
Yeah, I get that too (with libwnck 2.16.3, libxfcegui4/xfwm4 4.4.1). For some reason, when I was trying to remember that bug, I thought it was the repeat behavior. I think you should report this bug upstream to Xfce's bugzilla, if you haven't done so already.
@andrewsomething:
No, I'm not running compiz or beryl when I test - only xfwm4's compositor is enabled. I don't remember saying that those packages were required anywhere, though.

I just filed bug 3439 with xfce.

http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3439

Sorry for the spam.

With the fix in Xfwm4 SVN (which I applied to xfwm4 4.4.1), the problem has dissipated. Unfortunately, now it seems that AWN does not want to remain between workspaces - but I'm not sure whether it's related.

@Mark Lee
AWN only appears on one workspace for me also. The problem also existed for me before I upgraded to xfwm4-svn. See bug 152822

AWN now appears on all workspaces in xfwm4 svn.

Here's the patch for xfwm4 (applied against 4.4.1), for future reference.

Adding an Ubuntu bug task and marking it as fix committed.

Lionel: do we already have this patch in our package ?

xfwm4 (4.4.2-1ubuntu2) hardy; urgency=low

  * debian/01_dock-window-fix.patch: fix a bug that prevents windows to be
    focused while running awn. (LP: #130480,#162117)
  * Bump Standards-Version to 3.7.3.

 -- Lionel Le Folgoc <email address hidden> Sat, 15 Dec 2007 12:49:34 +0100

I'm marking this as WONTFIX for Awn because even though it affects Awn, it's not something that can be fixed in Awn - it's already been fixed in xfwm4, so I'm closing the bug on this end.