The future of…

The future of the project: It’s fairly clear now that Mutter will be an alternative window manager in GNOME 2.28, and the only window manager in GNOME 3.  It is therefore taking over the reins from Metacity 2: effectively, Mutter is Metacity 3.

But what is to happen to Metacity 2?  Your chronicler believes that the community is better served by working on Mutter, and will do so.  Metacity 2 will not be actively developed, other than for bug fixes.  It is possible that some people out there would like Metacity 2 to continue, and if so they are welcome to fork the project and take over, and your chronicler will offer them as much support in doing so as possible.

The future of the bug list: There are five hundred bugs open against Metacity, more than one maintainer can humanly tackle.  Rather than simply closing them all, I propose working through them ten at a time and deciding for each one whether:

• alreadyfixed: it is already fixed in Mutter or gnome-shell (this is true of several enhancement requests), and so should be marked WORKSFORME or similar
• reassign: it is a Metacity bug that can be reproduced in Mutter, and should therefore be reassigned
• enhancement: it is an enhancement request which Mutter or gnome-shell could take on board; these should be discussed on the mutter-list and perhaps also in the squib of the day feature on this blog;
• metacity: it is a bug which should be fixed both in Metacity 2 and in Mutter;
• wontfix: it is an enhancement request which we WONTFIX.

These could be done as we go along, or could be marked with the relevant keywords and then group-edited.  Gentle reader, might you be willing to take on a block or two?

How can we best organise this?  Should we use the wiki and assign blocks to people?  Those of you here at GCDS, would you like to get into a room somewhere and work through the list together?

The future of this blog: I want this blog to continue.  I would like to expand it beyond its current focus:

• to include discussion of Mutter as well, obviously
• to include Mutter data in the Metacity Journal posts (these are largely automated and only edited by a human)
• to include news of interesting developments in window management (such as the current debate over compositor-specific hints in the EWMH)
• to have guest bloggers occasionally (again, any volunteers?)

One danger is that your chronicler spends more of their time writing blog posts than fixing code.  Suggestions for solving this problem are welcome.  It may involve delegation to someone who is better at blogging than coding.

Photo © Greg Emel, cc-by-nc-sa.