Actual fixes:

• GNOME bug 474889 LONG KEY IS LONG: There is a particular GConf key which contained a small novel in the long description, and some of the translators asked for it to be shorter. We agreed on this in principle months ago, and then never actually did it. Sorry. Nostra culpa (or indeed mea culpa: Thomas was down to actually make the change).
• GNOME bug 112560: Sometimes Metacity grabs the keyboard, for example when you’re using alt-Tab, and then you might decide to stop doing that and do something else without actually finishing the alt-Tab. What if you let go of Tab without letting go of alt and then pressed f1? This is a basic fix for that case and, again, it should have gone in months ago but got lost. (Yesterday I did a sort of garbage collection pass over the bug list. I think I should do that more often.)
• GNOME bug 496054: a reported crash in obscure circumstances in the menu code, when you only have a single workspace; we couldn’t replicate it but it’s no bad thing to check you’re not passing nulls around, which was the obvious fix.
• GNOME bug 501362: Kjartan Maraas reported a typo where the “y” coordinate was checked twice in themes instead of the “x” and the “y” both once; Martin Meyer provided a patch(!).

Things people are actively talking about (as ever, feel free to jump into the conversation):

• GNOME bug 480954: random crash, probably not reproducible, dup finder finds nothing; I doubt this is going to lead anywhere
• GNOME bug 502644: someone wants a way to turn off wireframe as such, rather than minimise and drag wireframes separately.
• GNOME bug 500279 (the theme parser refactor): Andrea Cimitan says it interacts in bad ways with Iain’s compositor, so we are putting 500279 on hold until the compositor is sorted.
• GNOME bug 502635: Should it be the responsibility of the window manager to tell your IM client to set you “away” when you make another window fullscreen, since you can’t use the IM client?

Translation: Spanish, Czech, Belarusian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Galician have been worked on recently. Thank you all for contributing and reading and using.

Gossip:

• Opotumon coincidentally decides to uninstall Metacity because of the minimise effect!
• Libre et Ouvert has been covering GNOME/GTK eyecandy recently and is interested to hear about Iain’s compositor, causing some speculation in the comments over Metacity’s status in the Ubuntu default installation.
• Parzialmente scremato writes at length about the exciting compositing work going on in “an obscure branch with an unpronouncable name”.

Till next time…

Photo: The Peacock, St Albans. Photo: Gary Houston, public domain.

GNOME bug 500279: theme inefficiency: Iain continued to rock on by finding and fixing quite a major inefficiency in the theme code: values which could have been cached weren’t. Thomas began to review the patch last night, but it was a little too much to take in in one go. It’s all rather wonderful: thanks, Iain!

Compositor rewrite: Still on the verge of being able to start making the call about putting it into trunk. If anyone wants to come around and make real life less complicated so there’s more time for patch review during the week…

GNOME bug 150897 has had some dupes recently. The Windows key or whatever you want to call it is a thornier issue than you might suppose. We generally make it a modifier key, perhaps the one which X calls Super– a hangover from the Space Cadet Keyboard– so that you can use it in combination with other keystrokes in the same way you can Ctrl and Shift and Alt. (There’s Super-R for run, and so on.) Some people think that this is a bad idea and that the Windows keys shouldn’t be modifiers (these people never want to do Super-R). Some people want to keep Windows=Super, but also have the key pressed on its own being able to cause an effect (namely to put up the main menu, as it does in Windows). But there is no current case, as far as I know, in which you can make a modifier perform an action without actually modifying something else. (I don’t think, for example, that you can configure Metacity to minimise the window when you press and release Ctrl.) Apparently IceWM does this to some people’s satisfaction, so I expect we should look at how they manage.

GNOME bug 114384 has also had a few dupes. As mentioned yesterday, we need to support startup-notification. Elijah points out that we already link to the relevant library, so this may not be very hard.