Bug 941850 – app-editors/emacs-29.4 with xfce-base/xfwm4-4.18.0: ediff window loses focus

• Status: RESOLVED UPSTREAM
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description sphakka 2024-10-19 13:46:01 UTC]

Created attachment 906338 [details]
Emerge info for emacs

I'm heavily affected by upstream bug(s): 

   <https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=66999>
   <https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=70046>

I guess all this started with xfce/xfwm4-4.18 quite some time ago and, apparently, getting worse with emacs-29.

For my daily routines ediff is one of emacs' staples, but lately it's almost impossible to use it proficiently without much effort and patience.

Someone elsewhere recommends to activate Xfwm's focus stealing prevention ("Settings Manager" > "Window Manager Tweaks" > "Focus"), but it doesn't really fix the problem, beside making for poor XFCE user experience.  

The upstream report mentions a potential patch, if any devs would like to test it.

The real problem is possibly with XFCE. Here's a related report:

  <https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4/-/issues/777>

[Comment 1 sphakka 2024-10-19 13:46:51 UTC]

Created attachment 906339 [details]
Emerge info for xfwm

[Comment 2 Ulrich Müller 2024-10-20 14:09:18 UTC]

I can reproduce the problem with the recipe from https://debbugs.gnu.org/70046#5, with xfwm4-4.18.0 and emacs-29.4[Xaw3d athena -gtk -motif] or 31.0.9999.

[Comment 3 Ulrich Müller 2024-10-20 14:31:37 UTC]

AFAICS, this must be solved by either of the upstreams, and there's not much we can do about it on the distro level.

@XFCE team, please comment if you have a different opinion.

[Comment 4 Ulrich Müller 2024-10-23 15:26:37 UTC]

Closing for now.

Feel free to reopen when there's an upstream fix that we can backport.