Another day, another Metacity Journal, and your chronicler still has not resurrected the script.
Bugs
As ever, feel free to dive in with any of these.
- GNOME bug 558058, Launchpad bug 258054, and possibly Launchpad bug 266929 were obscure bugs caused by dereferencing the values of GConf keys which are never null on a properly-configured system; changes in GDM allowed Metacity to be run sometimes without values for these keys, exposing the crashes. Now fixed.
- GNOME bug 558309: Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle noted that some names of variables weren’t double-quoted in error messages. Now fixed.
- GNOME bug 557921: Lennart Poettering suggests adding sound effects to Metacity. What are your thoughts, gentle reader?
Around the blogs
- Jeremy Visser tells us how to improve the refresh rate of Metacity’s compositor. (Is it worth making this part of Metacity? Iain? anyone?)
- SomGNU has a short review of the compositor. Seems the compositor is a hot topic.
There was a lot of discussion about theme patriation on gtk-list for apps such as icanhasedit; almost all the responses were negative. This diverged into a discussion about window matching, which Thomas has promised a blog post on soon.
I tried to put some objectiveness onto the Theme patriation thread.
For me, Metacity also feels jerky with compositing on. So if increasing the refresh rate improves this, I’d say do it.
The primary reason though why I haven’t turned compositing on yet is this: When restoring a window or calling up the window switcher with Alt+Tab, the windows that appear sometimes “flicker”. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s like the window contents haven’t been fully initialised yet but are shown already and so for a fraction of a second the “garbage” that is there primary to initialisation is visible. Do you have an idea what that could be?
@Robin: I know what you mean. I’m not sure what causes this, but I’ve heard someone mention it before now who had some suggestions. I wonder whether Iain knows. (I’m no expert on the compositor, at least not yet.)
Sound effects are *hard* to get right, especially sound effects triggered by user actions. Usually they’re simply annoying and add nothing to the experience. Notifications, on the other hand, have a legitimate use for sound effects (e.g. something to discretely tell you there’s a window flashing in your title bar).
Don’t listen to me, listen to a good user interaction designer, if you can find one…
Instead of hardcoding the FPS, why not ask xrandr for the refresh rate of the monitor?
Obviously there are edge cases: some incomplete drivers this will be 0 (so assume 50?), and multihead will complicate matters.