Re: Metacity, Mutter, GNOME Shell, GNOME-2.28

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 07:09 +0800, Sam Spilsbury wrote:

> A bit of work needs to be put into separating the code out (i.e
> separating clutter contexts, etc)

with my Clutter maintainer hat on:

Clutter currently, and for the foreseeable future, assumes that it will
be the one library creating the GL context on every platform for which
it has a backend. while there has been work to separate most of the
actual "canvas mode" (the basic scenegraph) from the toolkit (event
processing and windowing system) and that work made metacity-clutter,
and thus gnome-shell, possible I'm wary of adding yet another layer in
which Clutter is not even responsible of creating the GL context.

on a more technical level: Clutter uses the GL pipeline in its own way
through the COGL abstraction API; it sets up its own state to provide
caching. stomping over that system *will* create issues. I'm pretty sure
that trying to make Compiz, its plugins and an eventual
compiz-gnome-shell plugin work together while part of the process drops
into GL and other parts will use Clutter will suck.

badly.

through a clogged straw.

dipped in a septic tank.

> Such a design would be easy to implement in compiz via it's plugin system.

maybe Compiz should start looking at using Clutter instead.

or maybe Compiz should just rewrite a gnome-shell as its own plugin;
it's not like gnome-shell is using an esoteric set of little known
libraries.

bending and twisting three projects (Clutter, Compiz and gnome-shell) to
make sure that Compiz stays relevant in a world where kwin and mutter
exist (and are the default compositing window managers for KDE and GNOME
respectively) is clearly not only a waste of time but its going to
impact negatively on at least two projects of those three.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi