Talk:Metacity

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Metacity is not "the freakin' subject" of Pennington's article. His article is about making user interfaces easier to use and maintain. It mentions metacity a couple of times, which is hardly grounds for including it as an ext link. I could just about go for including any information on the origin of Metacity cribbed from it (adding something useful to the article's copy) and citing the essay as a source... but not for just slapping yet another ext link into a 20 line article.

Half of this article is about the "Controversy" about simplifying Metacity and the GNOME interface. I think it's fine to provide an external link that explains this controversy in depth. —Josh Lee 01:11, July 21, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] References

• Free software and good user interfaces. Havoc Pennington's blog. Retrieved on July 20, 2005.

Currently this article tells people very little about Metacity. It's a window manager (without even a basic explanation of what that is), development was started by Havoc Pennington, and it was controversial because it was simple. When did development start? When was metacity finally included in GNOME? Who works on it now? What programming language is it written in (C, I know, but the article makes no mention of it). Motor 08:56, July 20, 2005 (UTC)

Good point. You could move the link to the GNOME article if it bothers you. —Josh Lee 01:11, July 21, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Metacity pronunciation

"Metacity (pronounced like "opacity") is the default window manager for the GNOME desktop environment."

Shouldn't this rather read 'with the trailing -city pronounced as in "opacity"'? Or has it really been stated by a developer that "meta" is intended to be read out "opa"? :)

Hi, I found a description in the rpm package about metacity's pronouncation. It turns out that it's supposed to rhyme with "opacity", since it's about metacity, the quality of being meta, not about a meta-city, an urban centre. Swap 01:49, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I think the point of the unsigned comment above was that if "metacity" was to rhyme with "opacity", it would be pronounced "mopacity" or something. The Wednesday Island 03:02, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, of course, which is why I changed the entry to say that it should rhyme with opacity, more specific than "pronounced like". :-) Swap 18:42, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Screen Boundary Constraints

How can one discuss the Controversy of Metacity without addressing the screen boundary constraints? If a programmer politely asks Metacity to move a window partially offscreen (using WM messages even) Metacity will refuse. Is there another Window Manager that acts like this? Managing boundary constraints is the opposite of Cheerios -- it is a lot of extra work. To understand the issue more see: http://www.noping.net/kent/osiva, which is currently being ported to X.