Description of problem: it may or may not be an autoraise issue, but metacity is losing dialogs under the pile all of the time. it's madenning....especially where galeon is concerned because a lost dialog freezes the whole application! so, whether it's click-to-focus or autoraise that gives focus and changes the stacking, all transients for a given app (even if they're from another workspace...it's that important) should get stacked on top. --stig
They definitely do go on top as far as I know. You'll have to tell me some specific dialog that goes below some specific window. Chances are said dialog lacks the WM_TRANSIENT_FOR hint set to the window ID of the main window. xprop can help diagnose.
as I said, galeon (the one shipping with rh9) is the main victim... here's the image: galeon crashes and is restarted... 40 windows come back and load. one fails the hostname lookup and pops up a dialog, while the other 39 hang. (or maybe there's a window that's auto-refreshing and generates a failure dialog...why in the world did galeon2 get bundled if it's this cranky? i recall galeon1.2 being smarter...) yeah, when i eventually click the tab of the parent window, i get the dialog spawned by that window stacked on top, but finding that window can be quite a chore. there {c,sh}ould be a title marking for windows with dialogs. "[name]" for iconified and "<<name>>" for dialog-blocked windows, perhaps... but one pertinent question is: can metacity be smart enough to grok that some dialogs are application-wide blocks and stack the dialog and it's parent on top of all other windows owned by the app? regardless of whether there is any specific logic for handling problem apps, there should be the general behavior of autoraising dialog-blocked windows to the top of the stack instead of leaving them buried. galeon also may be failing to properly hint file-save dialogs because metacity's autoraise throws them to the back all of the time. regardless of hinting, i don't remember sawfish burying new windows so aggressively...i recall that autoraise was triggered by movement-based-focus-assignment while metacity seems to give focus to the dialog, then immediately take it back and start the autoraise timer. BAD POLICY... -- stig
If Galeon sets the dialog modal for the whole app, but only marks it as a child of one window, then metacity has the wrong information and can't do much. Galeon could set the dialog modal only for one window, or could avoid marking the dialog as a transient of a particular window.
Wait, RHL9 shipped with Galeon 1.2, no? Anyway, almost certainly a Galeon bug.
Red Hat apologizes that these issues have not been resolved yet. We do want to make sure that no important bugs slip through the cracks. Red Hat Linux 7.3 and Red Hat Linux 9 are no longer supported by Red Hat, Inc. They are maintained by the Fedora Legacy project (http://www.fedoralegacy.org/) for security updates only. If this is a security issue, please reassign to the 'Fedora Legacy' product in bugzilla. Please note that Legacy security update support for these products will stop on December 31st, 2006. If this is not a security issue, please check if this issue is still present in a current Fedora Core release. If so, please change the product and version to match, and check the box indicating that the requested information has been provided. If you are currently still running Red Hat Linux 7.3 or 9, please note that Fedora Legacy security update support for these products will stop on December 31st, 2006. You are strongly advised to upgrade to a current Fedora Core release or Red Hat Enterprise Linux or comparable. Some information on which option may be right for you is available at http://www.redhat.com/rhel/migrate/redhatlinux/. Any bug still open against Red Hat Linux 7.3 or 9 at the end of 2006 will be closed 'CANTFIX'. Again, if this bug still exists in a current release, or is a security issue, please change the product as necessary. We thank you for your help, and apologize again that we haven't handled these issues to this point.
Red Hat Linux 7.3 and Red Hat Linux 9 are no longer supported by Red Hat, Inc. f you are currently still running Red Hat Linux 7.3 or 9, you are strongly advised to upgrade to a current Fedora Core release or Red Hat Enterprise Linux or comparable. Some information on which option may be right for you is available at http://www.redhat.com/rhel/migrate/redhatlinux/. Closing as CANTFIX.