Welcome back, gentle reader, to the Metacity Journal, which now talks to you over your cornflakes.  This may not be a long-term feature, but your chronicler thought it worth trying.

It’s been a quiet few days in the world of Metacity, but here’s the latest news.  As ever, feel free to dive in on any of the bugs mentioned.

The recent post about why window matching is currently impossible brings up a chicken-and-egg question.  The window manager doesn’t do window matching because it’s nearly impossible, since windows don’t identify themselves, but windows don’t identify themselves because there’s no need, since the window manager doesn’t support it.  Perhaps adding window matching as an experimental option would help persuade people to add the GTK call to enable window matching in their programs.  Meanwhile, Thomas has suggested making these changes as a new GNOME Goal.

There has been some offlist discussion about reviving Vectacity, the SVG-based branch.  This would make theme editing a fair amount simpler.

Recent bugs

• GNOME bug 560142: AisleRiot and Metacity arguing over fullscreen mode.
• GNOME bug 533277: session restoration problems
• GNOME bug 524468: problem with the screenshot button reported; Thomas cannot reproduce it
• GNOME bug 487356: there are focus issues if a buried window is fullscreen.  This is quite important to fix and is currently at the top of the hitlist.

Around the blogs

• techrepublic says you shouldn’t overlook Metacity, but unaccountably believes that it was only briefly the GNOME window manager.
• wenlong finds Metacity is a useful window manager for use with Avant Window Navigator.

And that’s all until next time.

(That said, don’t overdo it; I’m drowning in email as it is.)

The patch needs me to set up dual screens to test it.  There was a joke earlier that there needed to be a collection to buy me a second screen, since all Metacity development is done on a laptop; I have now been lent a second screen.  However, for the next couple of days I’ll be unusually busy in the world of non-GNOME software, and then I need to figure out how to get Xinerama and so on working on the new setup. I shall, of course, keep you up to date with extreme punctiliousness.

Thanks for being such a friendly and helpful bunch of users.

As well as this, here are the bugs on the front burner for me for this week: if you want something else fixed, talk to us about it (and send us patches!):

* GNOME bug 499996 (possibly aka Debian bug 443933 possibly aka Debian bug 460712)
* Launchpad bug 221144 (possibly aka Debian bug 476386) (may be related to the above, although perhaps not)
* Launchpad bug 216049 – restore to wrong workspace
* GNOME bug 468075 aka Launchpad bug 133541 – vertical maximisation ignores struts, apparent regression
* GNOME bug 528927 — something to do with _net_wm_state_demands_attention, details a little unclear
If you think it should be different, feel free to advocate below.

Are there distributions not using Launchpad which have a systematic way to link to upstream bugs that we could make use of for keeping people installed?

This is the first time we’ve used the new “bug hitlist” tag, which may become partly automated like Metacity Journal is. If you’re working on a bug in Metacity and you have an @gnome.org address, feel free to post bug hitlist entries; if you are and you don’t, feel free to comment to one of them and ask for one to be made or added to.

I shall post Metacity Journal tomorrow, I think, but I just wanted to acknowledge the particular good contributions that Santanu Chatterjee has been making on fixing problems with keyboard grabs during drag-and-drop.