221183 - [Linux] Clipboard only available while Thunderbird is open

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 311340

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[shwag]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030923 Epiphany/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030923 Epiphany/1.0

Clipboard only availabe while Thunderbird is open.  Once you close thunderbird
and then go over to another app, you can't paste the string that you thought you
had just copied.  If you leave thunderbird open, you can still paste into other
apps.  

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Robert Mohr]

I believe this is due to MF not supporting anything relating to the OS in
Linux--be it http: links or the clipboard.  Is there a bug for OS integration?

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

WFM with Windows.  Still a problem under Linux?

Comment 3

[Derek Upham]

That's an issue with X.  X does not maintain a central clipboard.  It expects clients to "take ownership" of the clipboard and then stick around to respond to requests for the clipboard data.

By leaving Thunderbird open, you're keeping it available to respond to clipboard requests.  When you close Thunderbird, it is no longer able to respond to those requests.

Windows has a central clipboard and is able to maintain that clipboard in the face of clients exiting.

I believe that there are X tools that act as clipboard daemons to simulate the Windows behavior.

Comment 4

[Saïvann Carignan]

This seems to be related to recent changes in freedesktop clipboard manager specification which you can find here :

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ClipboardManager

This bug affects a lot of programs, but some programs like gedit, inkscape, pidgin are already fixed to comply with the specification.

Comment 5

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

This is a toolkit issue; duping to the relevant toolkit bug.