One of the forks of Metacity is known as Mutter, because it’s Metacity with Clutter support. It’s used by the forthcoming gnome-shell project.
In a recent email to d-d-l, Owen Taylor gave two goals for the 2.28 release:
- That Mutter should be developed using the GNOME infrastructure; and
- That users will be able to choose between gnome-shell and ordinary Metacity.
Some possible ways of doing these were suggested:
- Merge Mutter and Metacity. Have Mutter as a separate compositor within Metacity. Alternatively, as Colin Walters suggested, make Mutter a separate branch within Metacity’s DVCS.
- Import Mutter as a separate window manager. Remove all the parts in Mutter which are left over from Metacity and don’t work towards Mutter’s goals. Metacity remains for people who don’t want to run gnome-shell. Eventually it dies off.
- Forget about Mutter. Whatever we need to do would be done either in Metacity or in gnome-shell using JavaScript plugins.
One advantage of making gnome-shell play nicely with a standard (possibly Mutterised) Metacity is that it would still be possible to switch to other window managers: a great deal of ink was spilt in the discussion over whether users would mind switching away from Compiz, whether the Compiz developers would mind, and whether Compiz was the de facto standard window manager these days. However, Owen says that gnome-shell requires tighter coupling with the window manager than is usual, and that this isn’t really an option.
The discussion continues…
Photo © Alexander Drachmann, cc-by-sa.
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