• GNOME bug 502644: a lot of people think the minimise/restore, and drag/resize wireframe animations are ugly, and ask to be able to turn them off in various combinations (other than the combinations you can already use).

  It would be better to fix the animations, really: do any of you have any suggestions how they could look better?

  Also, would anyone who doesn’t like the wireframe applications be happier once we have a working compositor anyway?

• GNOME bug 115584 (yeah, an old one): Someone wanted a way to name, and bind keystrokes to, a large number of workspaces. At the moment you can bind up to a dozen with gconf, although there’s no reason it shouldn’t be more. Thomas proposed a scheme to let users bind n instead. Havoc said it would be crazy to have 64 workspaces each with its own keybinding. Thomas conceded this point. I think this is heading towards WONTFIX territory.
• GNOME bug 436257: when you cancel a keyboard resize the arrows should be consistent whichever side you end on. We have a patch for this now.
• GNOME bug 430198: theme preview should have the theme’s name in the titlebar, shouldn’t it?
• GNOME bug 333548: Alex’s patch reviewed and is basically good; some fixups suggested
• GNOME bug 439749: someone supplies a patch to add “maximise vertically” and “maximise horizontally” to the list of things that can happen when you double-click a window; it is their first patch, and Thomas attempts to be friendly while also asking whether it’s worth adding in new code for a feature that probably nobody has ever wanted yet
• GNOME bug 501365: dead code removed; fixed
• GNOME bug 403148: looking for some memory leaks
• GNOME bug 499301: refactor which probably isn’t interesting to any of you
• GNOME bug 133896: handle some X errors more gracefully

Elijah and Iain: I am thinking of making this entire blog licensed cc-by-sa. What say you? Anyone else?

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.