2008-01-28: the Metacity Journal strikes back

Good evening and welcome back to the Metacity Journal. Tonight’s roundup of all things metacitous includes:

Recent bugs:

  • GNOME bug 333548: Alex Turner’s patch is going in tonight just as soon as I’ve rebuilt absolutely everything because my glib build was out of date.
  • GNOME bug 358674 (as previously discussed on these pages) continues to be a major discussion area. There seem to be three major attitudes about unidirectional maximisation (i.e. the ability to jump a window to full width or height but not vice versa). Currently we support it but only by a keybinding that’s difficult to find. The options are:
    1. Don’t support it at all (even as a keybinding)
    2. Support it as an extra action which can happen on double/middle/left click, which would cause the least risk of instability
    3. Support middle and right click on the maximise button, as kwin does.

    Your thoughtful and considered opinion is welcome.

  • GNOME bug 511826: Window decorations don’t change colour: needs confirming
  • GNOME bug 509165: we should allow a “separator” element in /apps/metacity/general/button_layout; nobody has yet provided a patch. Could be an interesting one to play with.
  • GNOME bug 512676: alt+right mouse button should resize; I believe this is dealt with already using alt+middle mouse button
  • GNOME bug 512561: G_GNUC_FUNCTION (which gets you the name of the current function, and doesn’t work in many cases) replaced with G_STRFUNC (which is much more reliable).

Blog activity:
It’s been a bit quiet, really.

In the meantime, do check out Devil’s Pie, an add-on to Metacity which lets you do things like start all terminals on one particular workspace.

Image: was The Cricketers, now a curry house called Devdas, St Albans. Photo by Gary Houston, public domain. I always feel things are going well when blog entries are organised enough to have photos. :)

2008-01-19: minimal journal

A very, very brief journal entry. Metacity allows you to bind keys to horizontal and vertical maximisation of a window. Should this exist, since it’s so rarely used? Should there be a more easily-discoverable way of working? How would it work– right and middle and left click doing different things, as kwin does, or double-clicking the titlebar, or new buttons? There has been a lot of discussion about this on Bugzilla. Today your chronicler summarised the debate so far. Your two cents on the question are welcome; especially, I’m not sure how to gauge what proportion of people would actually use such a feature. (Lots of people will often tell you that they will use a feature, but you can hardly tell from that how many people don’t care.)

2008-01-12: For, indeed, the best medicine in life is a friend

AelredWelcome back to the Metacity Journal; it’s been a month, and Christmas got in the way a little, so this will be rather a highlights reel.

Havoc has sorted all source files into subdirectories by purpose, which makes the structure of the program a lot cleaner.

Iain has fixed some bugs in the compositor about drawing shadows and other things.

Thomas has made a start on documenting every function using Doxygen. The current state of things is already quite useful for debugging, because you can use it to see which functions call which other functions. For examples of parts which are fully filled in, see:

There is an unstable release (2.21.8) due tomorrow. Also, is there anyone out there who would like to lend a hand with triage? As always, we love to hear from you about this or anything else.

(Post title thanks to Aelred of Rievaulx, who died on this day in 1167.)

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