Re: mutter tiling

[Oliver Mangold <o mangold googlemail com>]

On 16.03.2011 23:23, Peder Refsnes wrote:
> Hi.
>
> My name is Peder Refsnes. I recently finished a master degree in computer science and just landed my first job doing C++ development.
>
> I recently joined the gnome mailing lists to see if anyone could point me in the right direction regarding implementing tiling support in mutter. As luck would have it, your mail announcing your contribution was the first that ticked in.
> I've been playing around with it and it seems very promising. Just wanted to let you know that if you wanted any help on the project I'd be more than happy to give it a shot.
>
> Hope to hear from you soon.
>
> Regards
> Peder
Hi Peder,

thank you for your offer. Yes, any help is very welcome. At the moment 
design issues are on top. We have to decide if it better to do this as a 
gnome-shell extension. Me personally, I'm not in favor of writing 
writing it in Javascript because of the dynamic typing (will be painfull 
to find problems caused by changed Mutter bindings). I think a more 
sensible language choice for an extension would be Vala. Does someone 
know, if creating shell-extensions in Vala works also? Is the 
'global'-object accessible?

On the other hand Mutter itself certainly needs some nontrivial changes. 
So the choice seems to be between
- the easy method of continuing on an own Mutter branch (but which might 
never be merged back into mainline)
- or trying to keep the changes to Mutter to the absolute minimum 
necessary to do the rest in a shell plugin (and maybe still having to do 
changes to Mutter which will not be merged into mainline)

Right now I'm stuck somewhat stuck in analysis-paralysis (looking at the 
design of Mutter and the Shell-Extension API). I'm open to suggestions, 
if anyone has an idea.

Best,

Oliver