Re: mutter tiling

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Oliver Mangold
<o mangold googlemail com> wrote:
> 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).

Why do you think that?

> 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?

There's no support for running various C code from an extension right
now, either compiled through Vala or not.

>
> 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)

File bugs patches for any mutter changes you need. git-bz makes this
very easy. If a patch is of sufficient quality, I doubt it will get
rejected. Mutter is way past its lifetime as "Cheerios", it's "Honey
Bunches of Oats" by now.

> 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
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