Re: Bug#969132: ITP: deepin-mutter -- lightweight GTK+ window manager for Deepin

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

On Fri, 28 Aug 2020 at 01:32:02 +0000, stan clay wrote:
>   Description     : lightweight GTK+ window manager for Deepin

Presumably this is a fork of src:mutter, similar to Cinnamon's src:muffin.

> https://github.com/linuxdeepin/deepin-mutter

I notice this Github repository is marked as archived. Is this package
still maintained upstream?

> Mutter is a small window manager, using GTK+ and Clutter to do
> everything.
> .
> Mutter is the clutter-based evolution of Metacity, which, as the
> author says, is a "Boring window manager for the adult in you. Many
> window managers are like Marshmallow Froot Loops; Metacity is like
> Cheerios."

This description doesn't really describe what deepin-mutter does, or
what its relationship to the original (GNOME) mutter is.

The way it works in GNOME is that mutter.deb provides a simple window
manager, but is not very useful on its own, and is not something
that people are actually meant to use as their daily window manager
or compositor - it's mostly only there as a way to debug the mutter
library. The window manager or compositor that GNOME users *actually*
use is GNOME Shell, which implements the low-level bits by linking to
libmutter. Budgie-Desktop and Gala are non-GNOME desktop enviroments
that do the same thing, and Cinnamon has a similar relationship with
Muffin, its fork of Mutter.

>From https://github.com/linuxdeepin/deepin-wm it looks as though the
situation in Deepin is similar to GNOME, with deepin-wm providing the
main executable and loading (Deepin's version of) libmutter as a shared
library.

This description adapted from mutter.doap might be a better starting point:

    Deepin-Mutter is a window and compositing manager that displays and
    manages your desktop via OpenGL. It combines a sophisticated display
    engine using the Clutter toolkit with solid window-management logic
    inherited from the Metacity window manager, and is derived from the
    original Mutter library that is part of GNOME, with modifications for
    the Deepin desktop environment.

    While Deepin-Mutter can be used stand-alone, it is primarily
    intended to be used as the display core of a larger system such
    as deepin-wm. For this reason, it is very extensible via plugins,
    which are used both to add fancy visual effects and to rework the
    window management behaviors to meet the needs of the environment.

I'd recommend using something like that instead of analogies about
breakfast cereals.

(See also the src:mutter package's Description fields, which I rewrote
in 3.34.0-1.)

Thanks,
    smcv