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as much support in doing
so as possible", but he will switch to working on Mutter himself. Besides all the work that has been done over the years on Metacity, Mutter has 12 contributors with at least three commits. The project is maintained by Owen Taylor and Tomas Frydrych. This fork, however, has one big problem: what to do with the more than five hundred bugs open against Metacity? As Thurman describes on his blog,﹃
this is more tha
n one maintainer can humanly tack
le.﹄ The simplest "solution" is to close them all, a mistake that GNOME has made in the past with the switch from GNOME 1.4 to GNOME 2. Jamie Zawinski called this the cascade of attention-deficit teenagers model. Thurman proposes a better solution: work through all the bug reports, then decide what to do with each bug. Enhancement requests will not be fixed, unless Mutter or GNOME Shell could use it. Bugs that can be reproduced in Mutter should be reassigned. Bugs that are already fixed in Mutter, such as enhancement requests, should be marked as already fixed. Thurman kindly asks his readers to help him with this painstaking work, for which no volunteers seem to have stepped up yet.
greatly increases the
amount of work". However, this approach is problematic for some use cases, as Sam Spilsbury, one of the Compiz developers, pointed out a few months ago: If users were to use compiz with GNOME, they would lose a significant chunk of essential functionality. This is the dilemma I am sure a lot of other desktop-agnostic window managers are facing as well. It would essentially mean that users _must_ use your window manager in order to use their desktop as normal. Of course it will perfectly be possible to create a GNOME desktop using another window manager, but then the user would miss out on the new desktop experience of GNOME Shell. For example, users will not be able to swap GNOME's window manager with a flexible window manager such as xmonad and still leave all GNOME functionality intact.
I'm personally pretty inte
rested in getting applications an
d the compositor properly synchr
onized so the user sees everythin
g drawn as smoothly and cleanly
as possible.﹄Thurman is excited about the opportunity to get a fresh start and rethink how to interact with the user: We have been working for ten years in a mindset which is now, of course, ten years old. There's only so far you can go in a purely evolutionary line of development. That said, I'm very glad the existing Metacity codebase is being integrated into Mutter and not thrown away. The new directions of CSS-based themes and application-aware window management finally make GNOME's window manager more than a dull but necessary component. However, the developers have made some decisions under the hood that will not be popular in some circles. There is no fallback option for those that cannot or do not want to use compositing, and the integration of GNOME Shell with Mutter shuts out alternative window managers. But maybe this is the price that must be paid for innovation.
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GuestArticles | Vervloesem, Koen |