This bug has many aspects. First, we need to find out what non-text encodings are commonly used on the Windows side. What formats do we want to support? Do we want to support only image data, or other data as well? Would it for example be more interesting to be able to cut/paste data between Excel and Openoffice writer than between able to cut/paste between photoshop and gimp? The motivation behind the bug needs to be clearified. Second, we need to find out what's good practice for non-text clipboard transfer in X, and this is definitely a swamp. The ICCCM lists a few non-text standard atoms. In practice, there are many other formats. For example, after selecting a image in ooimpress, selectinfo says: Available targets: application/x-openoffice-objectdescriptor-xml;windows_formatname="Star Object Descriptor (XML)" application/x-openoffice-embed-source-xml;windows_formatname="Star Embed Source (XML)" application/x-openoffice-drawing;windows_formatname="Drawing Format" application/x-openoffice-gdimetafile;windows_formatname="GDIMetaFile" application/x-openoffice-emf;windows_formatname="Image EMF" application/x-openoffice-wmf;windows_formatname="Image WMF" application/x-openoffice-bitmap;windows_formatname="Bitmap" PIXMAP image/bmp I tried to fetch some info after copying some stuff out of The Gimp, but I don't succed. To quote http://leuksman.com/mac/gimp/clipboard.php: "Gimp doesn't normally use the system clipboard for cut-and-pasting images, probably due to X11's traditionally cryptic clipboard system. The Windows port though has for some time shipped with a plug-in to add this support." It's a bit scary that not even a program that specializes in image manipulation and has hundreds of developers has any decent X11 image clipboard functionality. To summarize - we need to determine exactly what should be possible to do when it comes to cutting/pasting non-text data via rdesktop between X11 and Windows before even doing a time estimation.
Perhaps http://www.fltk.org/applications/str.php?L3058 could be used as inspiration?
rdesktop (and associated tools) is being removed from the ThinLinc product.