[BRLTTY] Regression: Making selection in BRLTTY clear X clipboard

[Samuel Thibault]

Hello,

Aura Kelloniemi, le lun. 08 nov. 2021 18:48:54 +0200, a ecrit:
> On 2021-11-07 at 21:02 +0100, Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
>  > Aura Kelloniemi, le dim. 07 nov. 2021 20:31:36 +0200, a ecrit:
>  > > Also, orca announces all X clipboard events. When I select text with BRLTTY,
>  > > it does not announce any clipboard changes.
> 
>  > AIUI that's an explicit notification from gtk applications, that BRLTTY
>  > doesn't do indeed.
> 
> Sometimes though it has happened that if I select text with BRLTTY in a VT,
> orca announces "Text copied to clipboard." This does not happen any more. I
> don't remember whether this was consistent or not.
> 
> Anyhow, the fix that you provided works. Both LibreOffice and Firefox work
> again. But 'xclip -o' still does not work consistently.

You need to tell xclip to use the "clipboard" selection with

xclip -selection clipboard -o

I haven't implemented support for the "primary" selection in brltty
since the brltty user interface is an explicit copy action.

> I wonder what broke them?

Was this really working before? The support for the X clipboard is very
recent in BRLTTY.

> The following thoughts might be off-topic, but I put them here just in case:
> 
> There is something weird in my X clipboard. If I select text in an application
> with keyboard, the text is pasteable (in any application) only as long as the
> original application is running. If I quit the originating program, the
> clipboard once again is empty. I don't know much about X, but I believe this
> should not be the case.

That's a surprising behavior yes but that's how X works: the "clipboard"
is actually an application-to-application transfer (which allows content
negociation to transfer rich text features for instance). So if an
application quits, its clipboard content is not available any more. That
said, some applications on their termination copy the textual content of
their clipboard to the X root window so that it remains available after
their termination. Yes, this is all surprising behavior when you are
used to windows' clipboard which really stores an OLE object.

Samuel