Re: [gnome-flashback] Metacity 3.12.0

[Alberts Muktupāvels <alberts muktupavels gmail com>]

Hi all,
Thank you Alberts. I filed a bug yesterday itself in the debian BTS
after seeing your mail. See  https://bugs.debian.org/751683 .

The Debian PTS reports 2.34.13-1 as the current metacity version in debian.

http://packages.qa.debian.org/m/metacity.html

The debian-gnome team is trying to get GNOME 3.12 for jessie.
Previously the debian-gnome team was thinking of having GNOME 3.14 but
as soft-freeze would be happening in couple of months, it seems the
team would have to settle for GNOME 3.12 .

Dmitry will upload metacity 3.12.0 to debian. He is waiting response from monodevelop developers.

One other thing which was discussed was upower. Coincidentally the
debian-gnome team is also working towards getting upower 0.99 support
in all the apps. that need it. See

https://release.debian.org/transitions/html/auto-upower.html

They are trying to slowly migrate the packages to use upower. When
that would happen is anybody's guess although the signs are positive.
For e.g. see :-

https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-gnome-maintainers/2014-June/111110.html

- A package using the new upower 0.99.

Maybe perhaps you could also help with some of the upstream packages as well ?

Dmitry has created patch for gnome-applets to build with upower 0.99, but I think there wont be any new release for gnome-applets package. We will try to merge gnome-applets into gnome-panel package. There is experimental branch with Dmitry's patch applied.

What was interesting to read in the changelog/NEWS was that mutter
devs. helped quite a bit to metacity to port to GTK+3 . I was always
under the impression that there was some competition between the two
projects for as memory serves Mutter started as a fork of metacity.

I do remember reading this piece which appeared on lwn.net several
years ago http://lwn.net/Articles/344734/

They helped, but not directly. Almost every part regarding porting to GTK+ 3 was more or less copy&paste from older mutter releases. It is their work. That is reason why I wrote them as porting authors.

It's good to see them working with each other, may the tribe increase.

The only thing which troubles me is this :-

' - Compositing manager is enabled by default now '

I'm not sure how much more this would stress outdated machines like
the one I have atm. :-

Intel Dual-Core CPU E5400 (soc 775) @ 2.70GHz,  Asus MB P5KPL-AM IN
(Intel G31) , 2 GB DDR2 RAM.

If you have done any tests or know of links when people have tested
with compositing on and not.

Looking forward to knowing more.

Nautilus is main reason for this step. Without compositing manager you wont see background image if you want use desktop icons. You can still disable it if you want.

P.S. If someone is ready to prepare patch for nautilus and it will get accepted and merged than I could revert compositing manager to disabled state by default. What patch should do - detect if transparency is available or not. If not than make fake transparency by getting background image from root window and set it as nautilus desktop window background.

(This is only idea and I don't know if that is even possible. Also even making such patch does not guarantee that nautilus developers will accept it.)

--

Alberts Muktupāvels