The way ahead for Compiz
It’s been somewhat quiet from the Compiz and Compiz Fusion front lately, relatively speaking, and there’s a reason for that.
A while back, David Reveman started working on what is known as the “object framework” for Compiz, which represent the single biggest do-over that Compiz has had since it’s inception. To quote David [1]: ” If we ever hadreleased a 1.0, this would definitely qualify for a 2.0.”.
During the last few days, David has also posted a few documents [2][3][4] about the reasoning behind and plans ahead for these major changes. To make a long story short: We are in for a major re-design of the core which will (hopefully) give us a more robust, flexible and maintainable core.
What this means for the user is that there will be little new flashy stuff for a while. We will need time to adjust for these changes when the object framework is eventually merged with the master branch. Until that is done, there will be no significant core changes.
This, in turn, means that things such as input transformation/redirection will be delayed. However, this is somewhat good news. Not that it is delayed, but these core changes will allow for a cleaner implementation of important features like that.
One of the great things this will lead to is the ability to have Compiz running without OpenGL support, as a standard window manager. This will allow Compiz to run regardless of your hardware, which will give a more consistent feel, since the “fallback” wm and main wm is the same.
Nice! One of my problems with Compiz at the moment is that it’s a bit flaky. I can’t wait for this to happen!
Comment by Mark Gjøl — December 6, 2007 @ 6:43 pm
Hey Kristian,
Does this affect ezoom? Are you still working on it? It works great for me, but it would be perfect if it had cursor and caret tracking, not just pointer tracking.
Comment by linbetwin — December 6, 2007 @ 8:29 pm
This only affects ezoom indirectly, in that input transformation will help ezoom somewhat.
As for caret and cursor tracking, this popped back on my todo recently. I discussed magnification in general at GNOME Boston this year, and showed my ezoom-patches for orca to Joanmarie. It’s a small proof of concept patch, and we agreed that it does the job of proving the concept but is not usable to any real degree. The original plan was for Joanmarie to look into doing it properly for Orca, but she hasn’t had time yet, so I might have to do it myself.
Right now, I simply don’t have time either. I have a bounty for canonical (more on this later) and a todo list longer than I like to admit, combined with school. So this might take a while as it stands now, but it will get there sooner or later. All I can do until it’s ready is apologize for the repeated delays.
Comment by kristian — December 6, 2007 @ 8:53 pm
Oh no, you don’t have to apologize. Screen magnification on Linux has made huge progress thanks to people like you and the developers of gnome-mag, Orca etc. I am only sorry I am not a programmer so that I would be able to help. I have to stick to bug reporting and bugging developers
Thank you for devoting your free time to helping people like me.
Comment by linbetwin — December 6, 2007 @ 9:57 pm