2007-11-12: mostly going in just one direction

Hare and Hounds, St AlbansIt’s been a busy day here in the Metacity bug tracker, so I thought I’d make a summary of the discussions happening around the table. Feel free to drop by any of them and weigh in.

Unidirectional maximisation continued to be a controversial topic. A while ago, we added the ability to make a keystroke maximise a window in one direction only. Some have said this feature is useful; others have said it is crack. Those who said it was useful also said they would like to be able to do so using middle and right mouse clicks on a button, as in some other window managers; those who said it was crack pointed out that this was inconsistent, since there was no obvious way to make the visual user interface show whether a window was already unidirectionally maximised. Various patches were posted. Codebase forks over the matter were suggested. It was decided that a gconf option to control this would be a bad plan. The idea of a “traditional Unix users” control panel to keep all the crack together was raised, which not only raised the spectre of allowing the crack in by the back door but also required getting control-center maintainers to co-operate. No consensus has yet been reached.

In other news, discussion continued about how to fix the bug fixed in the previous point release about not saving the coordinates of maximised windows; it needs to apply to fullscreened windows too. A success story: Federico and Elijah jointly found a fix for the problem about transient windows stealing focus. The dearth of themes which support version 2 of the format, which is required in order to display shade and unshade buttons on the toolbar, was shown by someone raising an enhancement request to be able to do so, although that veered off into discussing having a fullscreen button; naturally, such a button would be one-way only (since fullscreen windows don’t have titlebars) and would need to wait for version 3 of the theme format. And finally, this bug just arrived here from gnome-session.

Thomas is aiming to have all unreviewed patches reviewed within the next few point releases, since rather a queue has built up.

Photo: Hare and Hounds, St Albans. Photo by Gary Houston, public domain.

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Thomas Thurman

Mostly themes, triaging, and patch review.

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