Re: Mutter: plugins and interface

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

2011/9/28 Erick Pérez <erick red gmail com>:
> Hi:
>
> First, I'm not pretty sure if this is the right list for mutter
> questions, but I found no other.
> Then questions:
> mutter support plugins, right ?
> gnome-shell is a mutter plugin, right ?
> But gnome-shell doesn't let me load any other mutter plugins, and
> while I'm able of load mutter with various plugins in Gnome Fallback
> (I mean the old interface), I can't do the same with gnome-shell. if
> gnome-shell a mutter plugin, or a libmutter user.
> From my point gnome-shell is the window manager running using
> libmutter functionality, since there's no mutter process running when
> in gnome-shell.
> So the question is: Can I write a mutter plugin to be executed with
> gnome-shell ? I think no, but you can tell me better.

A bit of history. Mutter was designed initially with a "plugins"
interface, but this was fragile and crashy. Even when it was
"supported", loading two plugins at once would cause havoc.

At some point in GNOME 3.0 development, mutter was turned into
libmutter. Since it would be more work than necessary to replace the
plugin system, we just kept it in place as a hack. For all practical
cases, the plugin system is just an implementation detail to how you
use libmutter, but and it should be removed. It's just that it doesn't
give us anything extra to remove it, except code clarity. It's not
meant to be a thing you deal with.

> Second, or third by now:
> What is the preferred way of removing a window's decoration from a
> particular window. There's this method in mutter (meta/frame.h) called
> "meta_window_destroy_frame" which I presumed does that, but that one
> isn't available from outside. Then I have to choice, fill a bug with a
> patch in mutter for making that one available so you can call it from
> outside mutter itself, or manage the decorations by hacking the
> decorations relative hints of the window through x11 interface for
> that ?

Why do you want to remove a window's decorations from a Shell extension?

> --
> Acta est fabula
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-- 
  Jasper