Re: Metacity Compositor

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 18:53 -0400, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Daniel Borgmann">
> 
> > Is there really any objective reason why Compiz shouldn't be at least
> > considered as a potential successor to Metacity?
> 
> Because it does not benefit from a long history of development, testing and
> fixes for crucial window management behaviour, and gives everyone terrible,
> vomitous flashbacks to Sawfish configuration (those who don't feel ill have
> not learned from history, and are doomed to repeat it).
> 
> It definitely seems like a useful testing platform for cool effects, but it
> doesn't seem like a step forward for GNOME in general. It would be great if
> we could figure out a way to take well-tested effects and improvements from
> Compiz and deliver them to Metacity...

I don't want to speak too much about something I wasn't directly
involved with, but adding GL-based compositing to Metacity turned out to
be very much not a simple task; to finish the job might require more
major reworking of the codebase than has been done so far.

For people who will be at the summit, I'm sure Soeren can provide more
details about what worked, and what didn't work, and what direction to
take for someone picking up the code.

While there are some things about Compiz's structure that strike me as,
well, not the way I'd do it, if it's providing a better experience to
our users, we shouldn't block progress on worrying about every single
compatibility hack that might be in Metacity.

If somebody has some detail of wire-frame resizing that needs to be
exactly so so that there 10-year-old Motif application works, that
person isn't likely to want to upgrade to Compiz anyways.

There's been some good work for both NLD and Fedora Core at providing
a nice simple interface to configuring the important aspects of 
Compiz. I believe the Fedora Core approach is to hook up Compiz to the
exact same GConf settings that are used for metacity and set by
gnome-window-properties.

						- Owen