Compiz 0.8 was branched from master back in November, but only today do we now have the v0.8.0 release of Compiz. Since that point the future of Compiz was called into question and Compiz++ had emerged as a C++ rewrite of Compiz that also brings a separation of the Composite and OpenGL layers, a new plug-in design, and other changes.
It was then decided earlier this month that the Compiz developers would release Compiz 0.8 and then go on to merge Nomand and Compiz++ back into Compiz prior to reaching a 1.0 status. Compiz++ will be merged into Compiz prior to version 0.9.0 while Nomad will follow that. It was also determined around the same time that Compiz Fusion will be dropped.
Release 0.8
Compiz 0.8 Stable release, which will be first stable release in almost two years. This is an important priority because:
- Distro’s have been shipping unstable strictly-speaking unsupported releases instead of the stable release because it is too old.
- Most of the support team also don’t have the stable release, it’s just too old.
- It allows us to put the past code behind us and focus on the unstable branch
- Also noting that we will be making bugfix releases on this
- First stable release in almost 17 months!
At this point, the aim is to merge the Compiz++ branch into master. Note that this will be the most invasive change since the Beryl/Compiz merge! Everything will break. Lots of stuff, not even cube and wobbly have been ported yet, so please be patient or use the stable branch. At this point it also intend to drop some of the useless and / or broken stuff that is not worth maintaining:
- Emerald: This has major bugs which include crashing for no apparent reason (Bug 807) and switcher panel drawing. It is also based upon a version of gtk-window-decorator that is almost two years ago and among other problems, we don’t have any contributors who understand the code. We are hoping that other more promising decorators like Jasper will replace it. UPDATE: Before you all get worried about loosing all your themes, hopefully Jasper will be backwards compatible with emerald, if not then ease of porting themes will be at the top of our list.
- Splash: There is no point to letting users know that they are using compiz now, it should go into the background and not be in their face. For those who still want the plugin (Like me) it will go into a user repo, that way we don’t have to officially support it.
- Other core plugins:
- FUSE: Nobody actually knows what the point of this and I doubt there is anybody using it. Most likely to be dropped
- GCONF/KCONFIG: This is already in the ccp plugin. No point in porting these
- INI: This is a topic of separation, considering that it is already ported. We have some plans regarding metadata handling which might result in this being dropped, but it is useful in case in case you can’t use ccp for whatever reason.
- Video: We’ll evaluate solutions like textured video over DRI2/GEM/UXA and see if they are better than this. The only use for this so far is that video can dynamically scale depending on the desktop context, perhaps there is a better way to make apps more aware of this.
- FUSE: Nobody actually knows what the point of this and I doubt there is anybody using it. Most likely to be dropped
Source : [compiz] [ANNOUNCE] compiz-0.8.0