Half-finished code finishing marathon time

I have several half-finished bits of code lying around.  I think I’ll make an effort to merge them in, at least in test branches, to see what people think.  (When we get a DVCS, this will be easier.)

  1. Veracity, a test suite.  This is about two-thirds done, but will require a bit of autotools magic to link into the main build process.  I may need some help with that.
  2. Window matching: something to remember window positions across sessions.  There’s been a few requests for it recently (most recently, Launchpad bug 311615).  We’ve always said we wouldn’t do this, but maybe there’s no harm done in trying it in a branch as an experiment.
  3. Opacity, a simple WYSIWYG theme editor.  About a quarter to a third of it is written.  Probably would be best to make this a separate project.
  4. Actions.  The idea has often come up (e.g. GNOME bug 345233) that if there’s something you can bind a keystroke to, you should be able to put it into the window menu or make it a titlebar button or whatever.  This may be over-configurable, but there may be advantages of a simplified architecture in making it possible at all. There’s experimental code to do this, but it’s about half done.
  5. “Cringe”: how much can we avoid keeping in memory at once?  This is an answer to what I think is our oldest current bug, GNOME bug 144242.  Saving a few bytes here and there per window can really add up.  I’ve done a small amount of playing around with this, but more is needed.  Having Veracity working will really make this easier because then we’ll just be able to run a stress test inside valgrind.

Gentle reader, which should be moved out of Metacity Labs first?

Published by

Thomas Thurman

Mostly themes, triaging, and patch review.

9 thoughts on “Half-finished code finishing marathon time”

  1. C. I need to bind to libmetacity-private a lot (see the previews in the screenshot) and it didn’t seem worth writing the code to call it from Python or something.

  2. My personal opinion for order of preference on which is merged:
    window matching, opacity, theme editor.

    I see it as a bug that metacity isn’t able to remember window positions. Great work and keep up the status updates though.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.