Making Metacity 2.14 Usable (part 2)
Shortly after posting my rant about Metacity 2.14's new strict focusing, a familiar name appeared on Utah Open Source Planet: Elijah Newren, Metacity developer. The source of my pain lived in Utah! Going back a few entries in his blog, it became obvious that he probably lived in the Salt Lake area. The only question left was, should I track him down and motivate him through positive reinforcement or would a little negative reinforcement be more appropriate?
Well, turns outs, Elijah must've seen me coming. I'm happy to say, he's accepted a patch that makes the new behavior configurable and reverts the default back to Gnome 2.12 style focus control. He's even trying to convince the Gnome release team that the change should make it into a Gnome 2.14.x release! As soon as I discovered this misfeature, I knew that getting it changed in 2.14 would be a tough sell. For everyone's sake, I hope he's able to convince his fellow Gnome developers that this really is the best course.
Making a change like this after a release probably wasn't easy, and certainly doesn't look good to his peers. That's why I'd like to say:
Elijah, as a public display of my gratitude, I want to offer to buy you and your wife dinner at Olive Garden (or comparable). In addition, if you get the patch into Gnome 2.14.x, I'll upgrade that offer to dinner at Rodizio Grill (or comparable).
