[sugar] Preparing for the feature freeze

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hello,

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpgritti at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
>> Three more items I can think of:
>
> My take on the priorities.
>
>> * Switch from Matchbox to Metacity and
>
> Priority 2. I would love to have it but it might be too late, given
> that Sayamindu experimentation run into interesting problems.
>

I agree with Marco on this. At the moment, I don't think Metacity
gives us anything other than whatever is given (in terms of
functionality) by Matchbox. The main reason for considering a switch
to Metacity is, IIRC, seamless running of stock desktop apps within
Sugar, and I think we would need some more work before this can be
achieved (eg: support for standard window icons in the activity list,
etc). I would probably stick to Matchbox during this release cycle,
and devote a complete release cycle to testing out Metacity + Sugar
for finding out possible regressions and weird behaviours.
The only significant advantage is composite support, my comments on that below:

>> activate composition (eToys and
>> Record have trouble with this).
>
> Priority 1. Can we actually do this given the memory constraints?
>

Some comments:

a) Memory is a pretty significant issue. I was running a yum install
gucharmap in a B4 while sugar + browse + terminal activity was
running, and during the installation of the dependencies, I saw a
number of "Out of memory" messages (I think they were being printed by
some XML related utilities.. scrollkeeper ??)
b) The compositor in metacity seems to be quite new
(http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/metacity/trunk/src/compositor/compositor.c?view=log).
I'm not sure what's up here, I remember seeing drooling at screencasts
of a branch of metacity called luminocity around 2 years back. Maybe
they have only recently started to merge stuff ? For stock builds, the
compositor is disabled (via a Gconf option, though it is compiled in),
so I am not very sure how stable thing thing is.

Thanks,
Sayamindu

-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]