Posted on 2007-12-06
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.
[1] re-architecting compiz (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2007-November/002866.html)
[2] object framework design (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2007-December/002873.html)
[3] object framework design, part I: OBJECT MODEL (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2007-December/002874.html)
[4] object framework design, part II: COMMUNICATION (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2007-December/002875.html)