Cascade of attention-deficit teenagers
The future of Metacity: It is fairly clear that Metacity will be replaced by its fork Mutter in the near future: Mutter is effectively Metacity 3. Although I have some loose ends to tie up in Metacity, it doesn't seem worth continuing hacking on Metacity 2 when the life is in the other fork. In addition, there are over five hundred bugs open against Metacity, more than I (as the only active maintainer) can humanly deal with. Mutter has far more contributors and the bugs will be far more easily dealt with.
CADT: However, this raises a problem. I can't just close the bugs because there's a new version: that would be repeating the GNOME 2.0 mistake which jwz called "cascade of attention-deficit teenagers". Therefore I will have to go through several hundred bugs and decide whether they are reproducible with Mutter, and if so reassign them. This will be a long and dreary job, and if anyone wants to help out I'd be happy to assign them a block.
Nargery: There is also a discussion about whether windows should be able to indicate to compositing managers that they are still working on drawing a window, to save the compositor diving in and drawing the existing pixmap, which may be uninitialised garbage. Some people question whether compositor-specific hints belong in the EWMH at all, or whether they belong in some separate spec.
Meme: Someone is asking "What was your first word?" Mine was "gone." My grandfather used to play a game with me when I was a baby. He would take an object, like a building block, and then hide it and say "Gone".
Links:
- freedesktop.org is in bad shape. We can all help.
- The building that fell over.
- Giant dominoes: Symbolic toppling. I keep reading that as "symbolic topping", which must be good on representative cake.
- The longest known word in ancient Greek.