Re: desktop effects tab in appearance capplet

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 20:44 +0100, Thomas Wood wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 19:00 +0200, Patrick Niklaus wrote:
> > >
> > >  I'm sorry, but I don't believe 90% of "average joe" users are interested
> > >  in cool effects, unless you have some formal statistics to back this
> > >  claim.
> > >
> > 
> > Sorry, I think you misunderstood me there. What I meant is that, *if*
> > Joe The Average User wants to have 'cool effects' he most likely
> > doesn't want Metacity composition. What Joe sees is one of the rather
> > eye-grabbing effects (cube, animation, expo, whatever...) and he wants
> > to have them as well. So Joe looks into his appearance settings dialog
> > and finds something called "Desktop Effects", sounds promising, right?
> > So he enables it and what he gets is Metacity composition. That's not
> > really what Joe wanted, is it?
> 
> Possibly not, but this is rather a pointless argument. If his friend has
> managed to get the "eye-grabbing" effects enabled, Joe would surely just
> go back and ask him how he did it.
> 
> > 
> > >
> > >  Not really. Compiz is not on the list of modules for GNOME, so we can't
> > >  start adding support or dependencies for it. Otherwise we will have to
> > >  support ever other window manager that anyone requests.
> > >
> > >  If you want to suggest that GNOME formally depends on Compiz, or depends
> > >  on both Compiz and Metacity, please feel free to bring it up on
> > >  desktop-devel-list.
> > >
> > 
> > So what you are telling me here is that Gnome policy does not allow to
> > add settings that enable/disable/start non-Gnome modules? I don't
> > really see how Gnome depends on Compiz when you need to define a
> > compile time flag to enable it - that is an option not a dependency.
> 
> Right, and that's why I suggested the configure flag in the first place!
> 
> But as Jens rightly pointed out, even if we added this code into
> gnome-control-center, the distributions haven't actually all agreed on
> what features they want to expose and how. Sadly, at the end of the day,
> maybe it is better for the distros to all patch it the specific way they
> want. What we can do though, is make sure extending the appearance
> capplet is as easy as possible (which hopefully it is, since I also had
> this in mind when I set out the code layout).
> 
I would like to avoid having each distro patch it, that's why I
resurrected the bug, so let's try to get the list of what each distro
would like to do.

I'll start with openSUSE, where desktop effects = compiz. In the last
version of our "patch", we have removed the appearance patch and added
the spawning of compiz/metacity to simple-ccsm (a GUI for compiz
config), which will be as 'Desktop effects' in the control center shell.
Of course, this only covers compiz effects, and does not cover metacity,
but I still would like to support it upstream.
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>