situation with window decorations

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On August 27, 2009, Lucas Murray wrote:
> 1) Oxygen still doesn't have the settings for customisation. Once they
> add all the useful settings from Nitrogen then I agree that Nitrogen
> will probably not be needed anymore, however as the current state of
> Oxygen doesn't have those customisations then an alternative
> decoration must be made available if we want the features to be
> available in trunk/KDE 4.4

this has already been covered in this thread, as far as i know? which is:

* let's figure out what features are actually meaningful, and which aren't
* let's keep all the meaningful ones, and drop the ones that aren't

that means we need to:

* work towards a consensus of what the above means
* all be willing to adjust somewhat in order to do that, and not insist that 
every single one of our individual points MUST be accepted or else we won't 
agree to anything

we _can_ come to an agreement on the feature set. i think we have consensus 
that:

* we want ONE theme, not three
* we want more features than currently in oxygen
* Nitrogen currently has a weird hodge-podge of features and can be 
streamlined (e.g. the stripes or the multiple button styles, as already 
discussed)

does that makes sense?

> (I develop for the present, not the future).

are these kinds of comments really necessary? it adds nothing to the 
discussion, which already has enough historical tension around it. thanks.

> 2) Oxygen developers refuse to add any setting that makes things look
> ugly even if they can be useful to some people (Quote in context is
> available in this thread).

there's a middle ground there ... so let's just stipulate that this one is not 
relevant today.

> 3) I am ensuring that Nitrogen and Oxygen are pixel-perfect copies
> when default settings are used (Another reason why the default hasn't
> been switched).

makes sense.

> 4) The Nitrogen configuration panel needs work (And it's being changed
> at an alarming rate). Some settings need better descriptions/layouts
> and the like.

agreed; and everyone here is willing to go through that process with you and 
the other nitrogen developers. as a contender for the default, there's some 
discussion happening. hopefully it's useful.

> 5) Nitrogen does contain settings that will probably not be used by
> anyone. It was copied AS IS from KDE-Look, useless settings and all.
> They however add almost no maintenance as all that the setting change
> is a single small section of the rendering code. The big settings that
> change everything are far from useless such as the border size
> setting.

i think we first need to sort through which settings are meaningful and which 
aren't.

the useless ones should be removed, however as they are, well, useless. :) 
they incur an expense in terms of the people who end up having to use the 
configuration panel and they do have some maintenance costs (e.g. 
understanding the code for new people). keep things as simple as possible, and 
no simpler. useless options? it can be simpler :)

> 6) Nitrogen is the #1 KWin decoration on KDE-Look even if it's only
> been available for 7 months (That's my definition of "what users
> want"). 10,000 downloads and an overall score of 93% cannot be wrong

that's great. do we know _why_, precisely? and _who_ is downloading it? (so we 
know what to keep in, and who we are catering to in doing so?)

> 7) Ozone's only extra setting is being enabled by some users
> (Non-OpenSuSE users) as KWin receives bug reports VERY quickly when it
> breaks (And apparently it's still broken... Works for me though).

this isn't as meaningful as one might think. all it says is that people who 
use svn use that feature. it says nothing about the utility of the feature or 
the actual usage of it.

> 8) I asked Nuno on IRC if it was fine to swap Ozone with Nitrogen
> before I did the switch and he said it was fine...

how about we try for just one, and call it oxygen?

> 9) I am the developer that is overviewing all this, not Lubos. I do

good; we have the right people involved! :)

> however have the same view as him and have been discussing with the
> Oxygen team on how to fix this whole Oxygen/Ozone thing since I joined
> the KWin team over a year ago with absolutely no success at all.

can i try and help improve that? if you have already decided it can't improve, 
just let me know and i'll move on and do something else that's important. but 
i'd like to help here. and i think i can. i think we can get this worked out 
together, and without frustration or arguments. is that cool with you?

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software
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