Thu, 22 Jun 2006
Second report
The plugin prototype.
During the last ten days, I've familiarized myself with most of the Compiz codebase, created documentation about Compiz and my project in the wiki, as well as implemented the user interface prototype as planned. I've also got some new ideas about Compiz and how my work relates to other projects. I've learned that Gimmie's plan contains an item on getting from the applications the resources that are visible in a window: sounds like a case for metadata to me! Bubbles is an example of what kind of things you can do with integration where it's possible: I want to widen that scope.
It took me a while to get over some segmentation faults I was getting in
my version of Compiz and stop wasting time in them (twenty hours I would say).
First, window manager is awfully complicated software
because it has to do something sane in all the exceptional cases. Second,
programs in C you need to run in a debugger, even if it should
take another computer. Third, cp isn't enough when you re-compile, re-install,
and re-start software, because it actually changes the target file instead of
creating a new one, which in case of so plugin files leads into...
segfaults in the previously running program.
So more wikipages is better. More blog posts would be better too. Also more
version control repositories is good. It's so easy with current tools. I now
run
tailor to
distribute the Compiz CVS in Darcs, with and without
my patches. I made some private repositories too, such as for these blog
entries. There's even a
web interface to the
public repositories
on the project site now.
That's about it for now. I heard from David, he's busy but promised to look closer into my project later. I should communicate with freedesktop.org people too, asking for anybody interested in specifying a general X window metadata communications protocol, and decide about the common interests with Gimmie. I already sent a message to the Compiz mailing list about the documentation work. Of the six bullet points in this months' schedule, the one I haven't touched yet is Firefox extensions, so that's also something to expect from next week.
Posted at: 22:00 | Permanent link | Comment page
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