Re: Metacity and support for full alpha

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

John Palmieri <johnp martianrock com> writes:
> 
> I was wondering why Metacity does not support full alpha channels with
> PNG themes (or does it?).  Is it purely a performance issue or just a
> case of too many features, too little time? 

X doesn't support full alpha. ("full alpha" to me means "various
opacity levels" as opposed to "1-bit alpha" though I think you mean
"arbitrary window shapes")

> On the performance front, Metacity already does masking on its corner to
> make them rounded, could this not be extended to arbitrary masking
> (using alpha channels as a refrence) of all the elements in a frame?

It could be extended, I think you'll find that the metacity theme
system isn't very friendly to this though. metacity themes are more
restricted in order to support font size changes, button reordering,
and avoid theme engines. A window shapes extension would need to work
with that stuff. The code is frames.c, theme.c, etc.

Havoc