Metacity Goals

Inspired by Vincent’s
awesome Gnome Goals
project, I decided to do a much smaller Metacity Goals project.

These are simple coding tasks for those wanting to get started in
Gnome. The first step is to build a CVS version of Metacity — this
is much easier than you might expect because you do not need to build
all of Gnome (or even any other modules) and you don’t have to actually install it. Just follow the few steps in the “Minimal
Building/Testing Environment” section of Metacity’s HACKING
file to do this.

Second, pick out a Metacity bug. There are a half dozen or so easy
ones that I’ve put on the gnome-love
report (which can help you get involved in many other modules too). Of course, the ambitous can just look through bugzilla
for bugs, but I thought I’d point out some ones that I thought would
be easy (and which haven’t already been jumped on by someone else):

• Bug
  335076 — Maximizing and unmaximizing windows doesn’t raise
  them

  Björn left good directions on how to reproduce, I listed the
  relevant functions that would need to be fixed and other
  example functions showing how similar stuff has been fixed
  elsewhere. There are two closely related issues in this bug
  and both should be easy to change, though we’ll need some
  usability guidance one whether we want to change the second.

• Bug
  335351 — Support sibling from restacking ConfigureRequests

  Turns out there was a FIXME in the code that just never got
  implemented before because of no requests, but now we have one
  (and I’d like it for a few other things too). I pointed out
  what part of the code needs to be fixed and another section
  that has code very similar to what’s needed in the fix.

• Bug
  338361 — Focus with maximize/unmaximize keyboard commands
  and sloppy/mouse focus

  Good steps to duplicate and like the above two bugs I point out
  the functions you’d need to look at.

• Bug
  334899 — Right clicking on icon for minimized window and
  selecting close can result in a “are you sure you want to
  exit?” dialog that isn’t shown.

  I’m prety sure this is a one-liner to fix; see comment
  6 for pointers. Ignore the other patch; it was just a
  workaround for gedit, but this bug will affect lots of apps.

• Bug
  335524 — Warn when apps set WM_TRANSIENT_FOR to a
  non-top-level window

  You just need to detect if an app sets an invalid hint (which
  should only be 1-2 lines of code, I think; see comment
  9 for pointers). Then spit out a warning in that case.