[Compcomm] My ideas (for the record)

[Danny Baumann]

Hi,

> The sound effects plugin is a good example of something
> which should not be in the public repo *just yet*

I don't think that's fair to Andrew. The sound plugin is in a user repo,
and I think everyone should be allowed to have stuff he wants in a user
repo (as long as it's related to Compiz) even if it isn't stable or even
usable yet. Andrew has indicated he's a beginner in Compiz plugin
development, so having his stuff in a public repo has the advantage that
everybody who wants can have a look at his code when he has questions
and suggest improvements.
In my opinion there always should be a separation between user repos and
'official' repos. Working, stable, maintained stuff should be in the
official repos and be packaged, while WIP stuff should be in user repos.

> > There's a bit of a grey area here, though. When is it preferable to have 
> > one solution, and when is it preferable to have multiple solutions that 
> > do almost the same thing? One could argue, for instance, that the 
> > Application Switcher and Ring Switcher are functionally close enough to 
> > be the same thing (and in Beryl, they were the same plugin). Is 
> > duplication of effort acceptable then? Would it matter even if you 
> > considered it acceptable or not?
> >   
> This is more of a technical good-programming question
> and the answer would be that its always best to share
> common code.
> 
> I think even Danny would agree that ring switcher and
> the normal switcher could be combined.

Actually, I disagree ;-)
The first try to port the ring switcher to Compiz was a patch I sent to
David for switcher.c. He indicated that he preferred this kind of
functionality in a separate plugin - that's why we now have ring.c.

> I suspect that something like what has happened with
> cube and scale will happen with switcher and ring will
> share the important code with normal switcher.

Actually, the amount of shared code between switcher.c and ring.c is not
very small. It's only the functions building the window list (maybe 150
- 200 LOC of the total of 1800 lines of ring.c). In my opinion this
small amount doesn't really justify a shared lib. Also the model of cube
and scale doesn't really apply here as ring doesn't change the switcher
behaviour, but just shares a bit of code. Ring is by far more scale than
switcher ;-)

Regards,

Danny