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

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-03-24 at 00:18 +0100, Johannes Schmid wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> > 2) Mutter could be renamed as a project to mutter (binary, GConf schemas,
> > etc. Presumably, the internals would stay Meta*) and imported into GNOME
> > version control independently of metacity. The uncomposited and RENDER 
> > code paths would gradually be removed leaving just a Clutter based WM/CM.
> > The main disadvantage of this approach is that any ongoing maintenance 
> > of Metacity would not feed from or to this project automatically.
> 
> Actually I am bit in favor of this approach. Having the window manager
> and the shell separated has the advantage that they can be used
> independently. Think about things like Gnome Mobile or Netbooks -
> probably you want a composited wm here but you don't want GNOME Shell
> (but probably another shell that is based on a mutter-plugin).

In my mind, the Javascript + gobject-introspection approach is the right
way to go for all of these use cases. Just use different Javascript.
Resource consumption is not significantly higher than with a C-based
plugin, and it's much easier to achieve the customization at that level.

But that being said, there is current development with Mutter (what
Mutter was originally written for) that don't use Javascript and
gobject-introspection. Respecting that and not creating a fork is why
this option seems like the appropriate choice at the moment.

> I also like that mutter would only keep that code that is based on
> clutter. The RENDER stuff is mostly taken care of by compiz and metacity
> is for non-composited Desktops. All three have their use-cases.

(Actually, compiz is GL-based like Mutter/gnome-shell.)

- Owen