Spencer Janssen
We blindly accept the geometry requested by floating windows, which is usually the right thing to do. This case, however, is a bit troublesome. What do other window managers do in this situation?
I had a quick look but I don't see anything in ICCCM. I did a quick test with metacity (running in xnest). For this situation (where xmonad shows the transient at the top left hand of the screen) metacity shows it over the main window. My interpretation is that the application's specifying the position as (0,0) and metacity regards that as "don't care". The size looks OK, though, and the same in metacity as in xmonad, so I guess that *is* being set. That all seems quite plausible for a transient, so I'd guess if xmonad did that it would be acceptable. (Quite likely it is specified in ICCCM somewhere and I just didn't spot it.) (The application I used was synaptic, and I selected a depended-on package for removal. In that case synaptic pops up a dialog warning about the consequent removal of other packages.)