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

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-03-24 at 16:17 +0900, Sam Spilsbury wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 8:18 AM, Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de> 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).
> 
> Definitely. If the WM and the shell were integrated, it would mean
> that a severe chunk of functionality would be lost when using other
> window managers like compiz with GNOME. It's totally possible to
> separate the shell and the WM and instead abstract calls to the WM
> with DBUS. That way compiz can have a plugin to support functionality
> required by gnome-shell.

To try and make GNOME Shell integrate with multiple window managers
would either greatly constrain the user interface vision or greatly
increase the amount of work involved. The power of the GNOME shell
approach is that we are working within the desktop scene graph of the
window manager/compositor.

Using Compiz to create a GNOME desktop using GNOME applications, the
GNOME control-center, and so forth will of course remain possible. We
have no current plans to create hard dependencies on GNOME Shell within
the GNOME desktop (just as there are no hard dependencies on gnome-panel
now.)

- Owen