Re: Metacity Compositor

[JP Rosevear <jpr novell com>]

On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 17:48 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 00:36 +0200, Daniel Borgmann wrote:
> > On 10/3/06, Rob Adams <readams readams net> wrote:
> > > Realistically, compiz is unlikely
> > > ever to be accepted by either project, because it's a chimera.  So why
> > > are we dumping so much effort into it?
> > 
> > Why is it a chimera, because the GNOME dependent modules are optional?
> > That makes no sense to me. I rather see this as Compiz' biggest
> > strength, since it encourages code sharing and cooperation (as well as
> > experimentation). Is there really any objective reason why Compiz
> > shouldn't be at least considered as a potential successor to Metacity?
> 
> 1) Metacity has, over the years, accumulated a lot of details about
> how windows are managed.  These were designed to address our users'
> and developers' needs.  Any replacement would have to dedicate quite
> a lot of time to get these details right.

compiz took much of metacity's window placement code.

> 2) Metacity's theme format is stable.  Dropping in a replacement that
> can't use existing themes creates massive churn.

compiz 0.2.0 has metacity theme support in the window decorator.

> 3) Even if all other things were compatible, having a different binary
> name creates some churn that we have yet to solve well.  (See the recent
> difficulties with changing Gnopernicus to Orca, and how we didn't really
> get it right despite a lot of discussion.)x

> Why don't we just add the required features to Metacity?

See my other mail about technical difficulties.

-JP
-- 
JP Rosevear <jpr novell com>
Novell, Inc.