Metacity Roadmap

Maintainers: Elijah Newren, ThomasThurman

What are your plans for GNOME 2.20 (next 4 months, before feature and UI freezes)?

Elijah Newren: There's a fair number of metacity patches I still need to get back to reviewing, which cover various areas: bugfixes, rtl language support improvement, adding support for multi-screen fullscreening (vmware stuff, though the details are being hashed out on wm-spec-list), selinux-related labels for windows, and perhaps some others I'm forgetting.

There's a GSoC project to try to make Metacity work with MPX (Multiple Pointer X -- having multiple keyboards and mice per display, allowing several distinct windows to have input and/or a pointer). I kind of doubt it'll be done before feature freeze, but I started typing it here and am too lazy to cut and paste into the 2.22 section.

I'm really hoping I can have time to revamp the code/infrastructure dealing with the handling of transients. It's been sorely in need of refactoring for a while. I don't know if I'll have time to get it done, but I'll try. It'll mostly mean fixing lots of existing bugs, but might provide some ability for a few nice but subtle features.

What are your plans for GNOME 2.22 (next year)?

Elijah Newren: Doing the stuff above that I don't get to, plus lots of general bugfixing.

I'd really like to work on an alternative handling of xinerama & workspaces (bug 356946) and see how it works out; maybe work on fixing window placement at the same time. Might be a future release past 2.22, though.

Do you have plans for a future release?

Elijah Newren: Further EWMH/ICCCM support, where possible.

Improving DND interaction with apps; not raising windows on ButtonPress if the ButtonPress can start a DND action, and raising windows when the pointer moves over them during DND. Requires EWMH, gtk+, and metacity patches, but most of the pieces are almost there (and have been for quite some time...)

Do you have any goals from 2.18 that were not achieved? Why?

Elijah Newren: Yes. I had too much on my plate, as always, but trying to finish my dissertation was particularly grueling and counter-productive to GNOME hacking. (Many of my goals above I formed several releases ago; I simply never get done as much as I want to)

Is there something that is really missing in our infrastructure or platform that would help you?

Elijah Newren: Can't think of anything at the moment.

Do you have plans to work on other modules not maintained by you? What are they?

Elijah Newren: I'd like to add gtk+ API for keeping "popup" windows (menus, comboboxes, etc.) "onscreen" (where things like panels and accessibility magnifiers are considered "offscreen"). The DND stuff I mentioned above also involves gtk+ changes. (See bug 161972 for the override-redirect window stuff and bug 154260/341166 for the DND stuff)

Do you have any GNOME-wide goals suggestions for the next releases?

Elijah Newren: No.