[compiz] Thumbnail plugin

[David Reveman]

On Thu, 2007-01-11 at 16:38 +0000, Mike Dransfield wrote: 
> David Reveman wrote:
> >
> > I suggest that we add a plugin and a simple interface that allows any
> > application to request that a set of client windows should be composited
> > on top of a different client window.
> >
> >   
> 
> Its probably a good time to point you in the direction of
> the miniwin plugin, in case you are unaware of it :)
> 
> http://www.anykeysoftware.co.uk/compiz/plugins/miniwin.tar.gz
> 
> It actually creates the window as well as painting a scaled window.
> It also handles rotation so may be a good source of code/ideas for
> this plugin.
> 
> It is a very popular and highly requested feature, people want to
> ditch the taskbar and have miniwin manage minimized windows.

What people? I suspect that it's the people hanging out on IRC and
forums which is a very small part of the end-users base. I'm all for
including functionality that this group of people ask for but we should
keep in mind that most of our end-users are not part of this group.

> 
> On the point of modifying the taskbars to support thumbnailing,
> this seems like a good long term goal, but can I request that
> something like this is kept around for legacy reasons.

It's all plugins and I can't and wouldn't want to stop anyone from using
some specific plugin. What I suggested is just what I think KDE/gnome
developers would find most useful but I might be wrong.

> 
> Ubuntu users will likely have first access to modified packages
> but it would become a nightmare for support if these modifications
> were not accepted upstream to each taskbar (gnome is probably a
> given, but I am not too sure if KDE would be willing to accept it
> unless it was standardized).

This is not our problem. We're only exposing the functionality. If
gnome/KDE want to use it or not, is up to them. If packagers want to use
it even though gnome/KDE people don't want to, that's up to the
packagers. 

-David