More Metacity goings-on for 13th November. Apparently, for some people, no window has focus immediately after login, which causes screen readers to get confused. This has the potential to be an interesting bug, because it concerns the interaction of Metacity, X, and screen reader software, any of which might have been customised in interesting ways for a particular distribution. The original reporter says he won’t be able to follow up for a few weeks, though.
Unfullscreening windows which believe themselves to be as big as the screen anyway causes a workaround to be triggered and the window is returned to the fullscreen state; this is a regression from 2.18. Thomas is looking into it (though not very immediately because of a broken laptop).
Peter Bloomfield committed his fix that windows should not remember their positions while maximised.
Some small amount of raise-on-click controversy. There is an idea that which windows get put on top should be between a user and their window manager, and in particular that applications should not get to force this on people. This gets patched downstream— a lot– and there is a general policy that things which get patched all the time downstream should be patched upstream too. Some people are asking for changes in the way this alteration is made; the present writer is not on top of all the issues and should probably not attempt to explain just at the moment. Also, the historical lack of a unique-app ability in gtk is causing authors to use workarounds which then break WM standards (and again).
Someone complained that metacity does not set focus when it is forcibly killed; the reason anyone would care about this turned out to be that another program called ROX-Session has a method of setting the window manager involving killing the old window manager, whereupon a dialogue comes up asking which new one you’d like. Of course, by that time, you can’t switch to the new one anyway because you have no window manager.
The previous discussion about unidirectional maximisation slowed down a bit, with a discussion of code rot in alternative patches which aren’t (or aren’t yet) accepted into trunk. (The grandfather example of this is probably the double-click to close patch.)
Thomas’s patch review plan continues with a promise to review this patch about the location of user themes, but, again, the broken laptop has put that on hold for a few days.
Photo: Duke of Marlborough, St Albans. Photo: Gary Houston, public domain.
