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)

Contents

[edit] References

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)
Metacity also rhymes with city, which has nothing to do with syllable stress. Just say "pronounced with the stress on the second syllable" or something similar.--NevarMaor 13:25, 8 April 2007 (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.

Want it changed? Raise a bug. Marnanel 00:25, 18 March 2007 (UTC) (metacity maintainer)

[edit] Compositing window manager?

What comopisite-effects does Metacity have? None that I know of.

Off the top of my head: partial transparency for dialogues, exploding windows, wobbly dragging, shrinkydink minimise, menus growing from the point you clicked, probably other things. You have to turn it on though: it's not on by default. Marnanel 12:39, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
I checked everything in gconf but there are no options whatsoever regarding this. Is there any official announcement or just any statement from GNOME/Pennington about this? I couldn't find any informations on the GNOME-Site (which is very unsatisfactory in terms of Metacity anyway).
It's still experimental; you have to turn it on in configure, not in gconf. There will hopefully be a Summer of Code project this year to improve it. This here is about as official an announcement as there'll be for a while (I'm a metacity maintainer myself). Marnanel 18:31, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Removed Notability Sign

I fail to see how this qualifies as not notable. Its the window-manager of choice for some of the most popular distros (Ubuntu, Fedor, Debian). Not to mention its tight integration with GNOME itself.

This issue has been dealt with already, too. There are multiple secondary sources used in this article. There's most notably a Newsforge and eWeek article, along with others. These articles are about GNOME, yes, because Metacity has been GNOME's default window manager for quite some time now; GNOME developers host and develop the source code. The article is not a two-sentence stub, it's got a good bit of content and there is possibility for expansion. I don't see what all the fuss is about. Samuel Grant 01:35, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Blog

I can't add this myself because of WP:COI, but I thought linking to http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/ might be useful. (I believe it doesn't fall under WP:EL point 12 because it's actually the main source of dissemination of Metacity information; there is no Metacity home page, but the maintainers regularly post information about what's happening on that site.) Marnanel (talk) 15:41, 28 February 2008 (UTC)