GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 545323
Compositor should turn on and off from the command-line
Last modified: 2008-08-31 22:56:24 UTC
It seems, from reading blogs and forums, that many people like the idea of using Metacity's compositor but are scared of changing the deep magic of gconf. In addition, there is nothing in the "--help" text to show that we have a compositor at all. Therefore, I propose a new switch to override the current gconf setting for the compositor, which will display in "--help", and for symmetry another switch to turn it off again. I am not sure whether --compositor and --no-compositor, or --composite and --no-composite, would be better names. Patch coming up.
Created attachment 115493 [details] [review] Allow command-line switches to enable and disable compositor This also adds the short form "-d" for "--display", in conformity with various other X clients.
The patch says it doesn't feed back into gconf, but without that I don't see the point of the patch. Surely anyone who can't use gconf-editor isn't going to be able to find out the black magic for changing the startup command for metacity to add --compositor. Hell, I'm not even sure how you'd go about to do that. If instead the --compositor option turned it on in gconf forever then I sort of see the worth as you could just run > metacity --replace --compositor once and have the compositor turned on for evermore, or at least til you ran --replace --no-compositor In fact, you could have --compositor/--no-compositor imply --replace as well.
Thanks, good points. As to the black magic, I think: * all non-hidden command-line options are displayed in --help, which is far more discoverable than anything exposed only through gconf * in my experience as a fly on the wall in blogs and forums, people complain about being asked to type "gconftool -t string -s /apps/metacity/whatever", whereas they generally don't have any particular worries about invoking Metacity itself directly. I like the idea of feeding back into gconf, yes; it's counterintuitive that you then have to toggle gconf twice in order to make the change. On the other hand, I'm thinking about people who aren't necessarily already running Metacity, who want to try it with the compositor perhaps once to see whether they like it. But on the gripping hand, they can always give the argument again. (One extra side-effect I haven't previously mentioned: this makes the compositor usable in non-gconf builds. I don't know who's out there using Metacity with the compositor but without gconf, though.)
Addressed those concerns (except implying --replace; I think there may be a rule somewhere that we have to not replace unless --replace is used, and even if not people generally expect it) and checked in. http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/metacity?rev=3838&view=rev