Re: The Inevitable Compiz/Xgl/libcm Question...

[Soeren Sandmann <sandmann redhat com>]

John Stowers wrote:

> Soeren (and others),
>  
> I have been reading the news of Xgl/Compiz with great interest. I have 
> been browsing the source code of compiz and libcm in the appropriate 
> cvs servers. I have read the notes of your XDevConf presentation and 
> also that of Davids at 
> http://people.freedesktop.org/~ajax/xdc2006-notes.txt 
> <http://people.freedesktop.org/%7Eajax/xdc2006-notes.txt>.
>  
> I (and i'm sure many others) are wondering how these things fit 
> together and what direction development of metacity will take.

Well, compiz and metacity are similar in that they are both combined 
window and compositing managers. They are both going to require many of 
the same infrastructure changes to work well.

Both are based on GL, so they have basically the same potential for 
effects. There are no effects in compiz that couldn't also be done in 
metacity, and there is very little metacity can do that compiz couldn't 
also do.

The big benefit I see to extending metacity is that it is an incremental 
improvement. There has been tons of work put into metacity to make it 
usable, handle broken legacy application and integrate well with GNOME. 
Extending metacity makes use of that work.


Soren