Re: GNOME Roadmap - Information Request for metacity

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On 4/23/07, Lucas Rocha <lucasr gnome org> wrote:
> It's important that you take a few minutes to reply to the following questions
> before May 7.

I hope my reading of that last sentence as "before May 7 ends in my
timezone" is okay.  ;-)  I've been swamped with this move, which
incidentally started the day you sent your email.  I've been without
an internet connection until last Friday to boot.

I believe Thomas has some additional plans here (e.g. with the
compositor); I'll just respond with my plans.

> - What are your plans for GNOME 2.20 (next 4 months, before feature and
>  UI freezes)?

There's a fair number of metacity patches I still need to get back to
reviewing, which cover various areas: bugfixes, rtl language support
improvement, adding support for multi-screen fullscreening (vmware
stuff, though the details are being hashed out on wm-spec-list),
selinux-related labels for windows, and perhaps some others I'm
forgetting.

There's a GSoC project to try to make Metacity work with MPX (Multiple
Pointer X -- having multiple keyboards and mice per display, allowing
several distinct windows to have input and/or a pointer).  I kind of
doubt it'll be done before feature freeze, but I started typing it
here and am too lazy to cut and paste into the 2.22 section.

I'm really hoping I can have time to revamp the code/infrastructure
dealing with the handling of transients.  It's been sorely in need of
refactoring for a while.  I don't know if I'll have time to get it
done, but I'll try.  It'll mostly mean fixing lots of existing bugs,
but might provide some ability for a few nice but subtle features.

> - What are your plans for GNOME 2.22 (next year)?

Doing the stuff above that I don't get to, plus lots of general bugfixing.

I'd really like to work on an alternative handling of xinerama &
workspaces (bug 356946) and see how it works out; maybe work on fixing
window placement at the same time.  Might be a future release past
2.22, though.

> - Do you have plans for a future release?

Further EWMH/ICCCM support, where possible.

Improving DND interaction with apps; not raising windows on
ButtonPress if the ButtonPress can start a DND action, and raising
windows when the pointer moves over them during DND.  Requires EWMH,
gtk+, and metacity patches, but most of the pieces are almost there
(and have been for quite some time...)

> - Do you have any goals from 2.18 that were not achieved? Why?

Yes.  I had too much on my plate, as always, but trying to finish my
dissertation was particularly grueling and counter-productive to GNOME
hacking.  (Many of my goals above I formed several releases ago; I
simply never get done as much as I want to)

> - Is there something that is really missing in our infrastructure or
>  platform that would help you?

Can't think of anything at the moment.

> - Do you have plans to work on other modules not maintained by you?
>  What are they?

I'd like to add gtk+ API for keeping "popup" windows (menus,
comboboxes, etc.) "onscreen" (where things like panels and
accessibility magnifiers are considered "offscreen").  The DND stuff I
mentioned above also involves gtk+ changes.  (See bug 161972 for the
override-redirect window stuff and bug 154260/341166 for the DND
stuff)

> - Do you have any GNOME-wide goals suggestions for the next releases?

No.