This still isn’t a complete roundup of yesterday, but:
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.
Well, I only fixed part of the problem, or 2 out of 3 problems, and yeah, the patch is quite intense :)
There’s an accessibility feature which is able to listen to Ctrl. In /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse you can enable “locate_pointer” which performs a spiffy animation in response to Ctrl.
Thanks! If accessibility stuff is doing this, it can’t be impossible. (I really meant that I didn’t think it was currently possible in Metacity– maybe since the keystroke handler doesn’t allow it, or the gconf parser would reject simple “<Ctrl>” as invalid, I don’t know without looking in the code. But I’m further spurred to do so by the demonstration that someone else has done similarly elsewhere.)
*DON’T LOOK AT THE A11Y CTRL STUFF*
Sorry, for yelling, but that bag of crap has its own list of bugs in control-center. You don’t want to go there. Trust me, it’s evil, it’s hideous, and besides, it breaks tons of other stuff.