Blog: This week in KWin

[menotu]

By Martin Gräßlin. on 15. Juli 2012    (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2012, week 28)

I decided to start a new blog category called “This week in KWin”. Based on the bug reports we resolved in a given week I am able to highlight important developments in KWin. This is not meant as a replacement or competition to the Commit Digest – I am very happy with the digest. But it is for overall KDE and does not give us any possibility to add further comments to it or highlight very technical things which might be noteworthy (yes, there is the digest tag for commits).

The biggest difference to the commit digest is that this report is generated from the bug tracker while Commit Digest is generated from git log. I think the bug tracker is a better source to track the development of a project as quite often you have a commit series for a specific bug or feature.
Important Changes in week 28

This week we have seen the tagging and release of the last release candidate for 4.9. As you can see in the summary below we have fixed quite a few issues last minute on Monday. This includes two rather important fixes for the rendering of thumbnails and the logout effect is finally available again. These were changes mostly done on last day of Akademy and while flying home.

We had received a very interesting crash report for 4.9 (4.8 is not affected) which got fixed (not available yet in RC2). When you use an Aurorae theme and close a glxgears window through the close button, KWin crashes. We had such issues with the old Aurorae implementation and had thought the port to QML had finally solved it. So we added the same and already known workaround from the old implementation to delay the closing by one event cycle.

Last but not least there is one important change for the 4.10 release. KWin’s window tiling capabilities which were implemented by a Season of KDE project a few years ago had to be removed again as the feature is seeing some bit rot and is completely unmaintained. Thanks to scripting it should be possible to implement window tiling again and provide it in time for 4.10. And work is going on to make that happen. If you want to help, please leave a note :-)

This change does not affect the upcoming 4.9 release and does not affect the quick tiling on screenedges functionality.

Full list of bug/crash fixes here

[menotu]

By Martin Gräßlin. on 22. Juli 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2012, week 29)

I’m personally very unhappy to see bug reports being opened for new issues in 4.9 even after RC 2 as it means that the previous beta versions have not been tested properly. None of the reported issues is a regression compared to the previous beta and rc releases, so they should have been spotted before. What

I’m very happy concerning the bug reports is that none of the bugs reported this week are still open. All reports have changed the state to either resolved or needsinfo. For a relaese candidate phase that’s pretty good, but still we are looking for people wanting to help with triaging the bugs.

Full article

[Archie]

menotu ... are you ready for another round of testing? 

I'll prep 4.8.97 which is supposedly RC2 and will keep you posted. We'll need the usual requirements, and hopefully with all the things we've learned from since, we'll do it better.

[menotu]

menotu ... are you ready for another round of testing?  

I'll prep 4.8.97 which is supposedly RC2 and will keep you posted. We'll need the usual requirements, and hopefully with all the things we've learned from since, we'll do it better.

Oh - my apologies Archie, I hadn't seen your post until I came to add another post from Martin Gräßlin, but of course you know my answer  

[menotu]

By Martin Gräßlin. on 29. Juli 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

This Week in KWin (2012, week 30)

The major event of this week was of course the tagging of 4.9.0. We have two important fixes which made it into 4.9 and apart from that not much happened. My current work on Aurorae is not yet finished and has not been pushed yet. The work on it also discovered two small regressions in Aurorae 3 and I’m quite unhappy that we will ship 4.9 now with two known regressions. But they will of course be fixed for 4.9.1.

I want to use this rather quiet week to remember everybody about the importance of reporting issues early. We got today a bug report where the user mentions that he noticed this issue already with 4.7 and 4.8. Well by know it was already fixed in 4.9 and the user is unhappy that he does not benefit from the fix as he uses Debian Testing (which won’t go to 4.9 any time soon). If an issue gets reported when it got introduced more users will benefit from the fix and it’s much easier to fix the bug as it is more likely that we remember what we worked on.

Crash Fixes

    304026: KCM crashes on updating a deco’s settings because the lib is conditionally unloaded in new ::canLoad()

This change will be available in version 4.9.0

Bug Fixes

    303937: Quick tiling (snap) uses wrong geometry on alternate attempts.
    This change will be available in version 4.9.0

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/07/this-week-in-kwin-2012-week-30/

[Archie]

menotu ... are you ready for another round of testing?  

I'll prep 4.8.97 which is supposedly RC2 and will keep you posted. We'll need the usual requirements, and hopefully with all the things we've learned from since, we'll do it better.

Oh - my apologies Archie, I hadn't seen your post until I came to add another post from Martin Gräßlin, but of course you know my answer  

Did I even have to ask? Well, I'm just being polite!

Have you tried the KWin scripts? Geez. For a VLC fullscreen, the movie is now across my dual monitor, and I'm not sure whether to like it or dump it. I'll be looking around for more scripts to play with.

[menotu]

By Martin Gräßlin. on 12. Augi 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2012, week 31 and 32)

This week I present a summary for two weeks as I had unfortunatelly no possibility to write the summary last week. Of course the main event in this two weeks has been the release of 4.9.0 and as always this triggered quite a flow of new bug reports.

Since the release on August 1st 38 bugs have been reported against KWin and an additional nine KWin related duplicate crash reports ended in systemsettings. What is really sad is that we have a duplicate rate of 47 % since the release. Many of the often reported bugs are easy to find and easy to trigger regressions compared to 4.8. This makes me really sad, not because we released with regression, but because such issues could have been spotted and fixed during the beta testing phase. My wish for 4.10 is that more users test the beta releases and report issues.

The most often reported bug since the release is unfortunately a crash in the window decorations configuration module. This is a very nasty bug and interestingly the reason for this crash is in my opinion just lack of communication. In 4.9 we changed the API of KDecorationUnstable, as the name says that is an Unstable API. We ensured that an incompatible decoration would not be loaded and does neither crash KWin nor the decoration module. Unfortunately we did not inform the distributions about the change.

Summary

Crash Fixes

 304340: segfault on exiting cube effect
 This change will be available in version 4.9.1
 Git Commit

 304870: kwin crash when maximizing window when using Aurorae and BorderlessMaximizedWindows
 This change will be available in version 4.9.1
 Git Commit

Bug Fixes

 304248: Wheel operations on title bar not functional
 This change will be available in version 4.9.1
 Git Commit

 302783: In kde 4.9 rc1 some opengl fullscreen games dont work correctly, by not going fullscreen
 This change will be available in version 4.9.1
 Git Commit

 304253: The «bounce» cursor effect when starting a program is not bouncing anymore
 This change will be available in version 4.9.1
 Git Commit

 304520: flip switch incorrectly aligns window height on multiple monitors
 This change will be available in version 4.9.1
 Git Commit

 304564: blur effect does not work when the dashboard is first invoked
 This change will be available in version 4.9.1
 Git Commit

 304249: Long delay when moving window through title bar
 This change will be available in version 4.9.1
 Git Commit

 304799: kwindecoration kcm is broken when using a touchpad
 This change will be available in version 4.9.1
 Git Commit

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/08/this-week-in-kwin-2012-week-31-and-32/

[menotu]

By Martin Gräßlin. on 19. Augi 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2012, week 33)

This week we have seen many bugfixes for the next 4.9 release and more are in the pipeline. Overall nothing special happened, the distribution I wrote about last week fixed the downstream issue so we are no longer flooded by duplicate crash reports. Since the 4.9.0 release 39 bugs have been created against KWin and we already fixed ten of those. Most of the other bugs are of course duplicates and other incorrect states.

Next to bug fixing also some new features entered master aka 4.10. A patch to use mouse wheel in Cover and Flip Switch effect which had been blocked for some time by the feature freeze got merged and for the users of multi-screens we have a new nice feature: the window decoration context menu (alternative shortcut Alt+F3) gained a “Move To Screen” sub menu. When I worked on that code fragment I realized it needed to be refactored – that will most likely end up in the next report.

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/08/this-week-in-kwin-2012-week-33/

[menotu]

By Martin Gräßlin. on 26. Augi 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2012, week 34)

This week we have mostly seen work on 4.10 and not so much on 4.9.1. Two further bugs in Window Switching got fixed and a few more bug fixes are in the pipeline (I have a small review backlog).

But the work on 4.10 is rather impressive and really important. First of all I want to thank Jammy Zhou for adapting our OpenGL test application to determine whether the Catalyst driver supports direct rendering with compositing. Thanks to that change KWin will default to direct rendering and OpenGL 2 on the latest Catalyst drivers (in fact KWin defaults to direct rendering on all drivers now). If you are already using a recent Catalyst version you can also set the environment variable “KWIN_DIRECT_GL” to “1″ to enforce direct rendering, no matter what the test app thinks. This works with all currently supported KWin versions.

My work concentrated on finishing the Plastik port to QML which I just merged into master. The classic decoration is still around, I want to make sure that the QML port is working correctly first. Please give it a try with e.g. Project Neon.

Furthermore I did quite some refactoring. Last week I mentioned the addition of Screens to the “User actions Menu” and that actually triggered some working on that code as I realized that this needs to be split out. This refactoring got just merged, too. And last but not least, I finally finished some unmerged work from last year GSoC. We again and again broke the patch set which made it difficult to merge. The user actions menu which I merged first, caused serveral merge conflicts again, so that was not a trivial thing. I intend to do a dedicated blog post to explain the refactoring especially as I have some more work already prepared. The numbers of these three merged branches today are quite impressive:

21 files changed, 650 insertions(+), 353 deletions(-)
7 files changed, 812 insertions(+), 555 deletions(-)
36 files changed, 2509 insertions(+), 160 deletions(-)

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/08/this-week-in-kwin-2012-week-34/

[menotu]

By Martin Gräßlin. on 2 Septemberi 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

This Week in KWin (2012, week 35)

In the course of this week version 4.9.1 got tagged which will be released at the beginning of next week. In preparation of this release a few more bugfixes got pushed into the 4.9 branch. Overall the 4.9.1 release will contain 24 bugfixes, four of them crash fixes. That’s quite impressive and good work, but it is also a pity, because most of these bugs could have been spotted during the beta tests. So I hope that in future more people will use the Project Neon Image to test our latest version.

Speaking of that, this week we have seen how important it is to get early feedback. My changes last week unfortunately broke KWin badly and we got the bug report for that introduced issue the next day which made it really easy to spot the erroneous commit through git bisect and helped to fix the issue in less than 24 hours after it hit master.

Summary

Crash Fixes

    304881: The decoration kcm is not protected against an unloadable qml source
    This change will be available in version 4.9.1
    Git Commit

Critical Bug Fixes

    305875: Decorations not visible
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

Bug fixes

[menotu]

By Martin Gräßlin. on 9 Septemberi 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

This Week in KWin (2012, week 36)

Between writing about game performance benchmarks I also have to publish the report on the activity last week in KWin development.

The major issue this week has been an issue introduced in KWin 4.9.1. Under certain circumstances it was possible that KWin completely froze. From the perspective of a compositor that is the worst bug you can think of. I’m very sorry for introducing this issue and want to apology for any inconveniences.

Luckily the bug report hit us about release time and we were able to notify the packagers the same day and provide a fix for the issues the next day. In best case most distributions have never provided the faulty package to their users.

Apart from that as a reader of my blog you probably already know what happened this week. Some nice performance improvements hit 4.9.2 and 4.10.

Summary

Crash Fixes

Critical Bug Fixes

    306260: KWin freezes when navigating between windows
    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

Bug Fixes

    293044: Kwin + opengl compositing make firefox scrolling jerky.

    306457: m_vBlankTime in Options is not initialized
    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

    306262: Translucency Effect needs isActive() implementation
    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

    306225: workspace.displayHeight is wrong
    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

    306263: Animations in Translucency Effect are not working
    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

    306449: transparency bug in active window
    Git Commit

New Features

    303756: Allow Scripts to add menus to useractions menu
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

Tasks

    306384: Toplevel::windowType() needs performance improvements
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

    306383: Toplevel::windowType() contains superfluous hacks
    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/09/this-week-in-kwin-2012-week-36/

[menotu]

Not much in this blog but for continuity................
===============================
By Martin Gräßlin. on 16 Septemberi 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2012, week 37)

hope I haven’t forgotten anyone. They all worked on porting our effects configuration to KConfigXT and quite a number already got merged into master this week. This is truly an amazing community. I have not expected that ten people would turn up to tackle the complete project in just one week.

The “disadvantage” is that it basically blocked my work. I was mostly involved in reviewing the patches and merging them in. It took me nevertheless about a quarter of hour to merge one of the changes as some effects are special and needed adjustments.

Other reviews got stuck in the queue and because of that the bug list for this week just returned an empty list.

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/09/this-week-in-kwin-2012-week-37/

[menotu]

By Martin Gräßlin. on 24 Septemberi 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2012, week 38)

This week we have seen quite some bug fixes for 4.9.2 and the inclusion of the refactoring I blogged about in the beginning of the week. This of course still continues and more patches are in the pipeline. Also a few more effect configurations got ported over to KConfigXT.

Summary

Crash Fixes

    303244: Kwin 4.9 beta crashes on logout
    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

    305361: Kwin crashed after changing qtcurve configuration
    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

Critical Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes

    289747: Desktop Grid effect gets “confused” when adding a new desktop
    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

    301730: Ugly half drawn shadows (hardcut) in (qml)windowsswitcher grid
    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

    306281: autoraise raises inactive window under mouse when switching workspaces or closing active window

    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

    177495: Fullscreen windows unusable due to heavy flickering

New Features
-

Tasks
-

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/09/this-week-in-kwin-2012-week-38/

[menotu]

By Martin Gräßlin. on 29 Septemberi 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

And another week gone. Major event of course tagging of 4.9.2 and a few more bug fixes for this version.

But that’s not the only work that happened. I still have a few changes under review but also merged in some further changes for the OpenGL compositor I had been working on during XDC. Nothing really special except maybe that the specific OpenGL compositors can now be referenced by an enum type which simplifies the code checking for OpenGL 1/2 specific code in the effects.

Summary

Crash Fixes
-

Critical Bug Fixes
-

Bug Fixes

    307365: Decoration broken in maximized state
    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

    307609: Zoom effect broken in master
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

    307125: Closed Windows stay in dock apps like AWN and docky with desktop-effects enabled
    This change will be available in version 4.9.2
    Git Commit

New Features
-

Tasks
-

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/09/this-week-in-kwin-2012-week-39/

[Archie]

Thanks for all the info, menotu. I looks like we might have to jump to testing 4.9.2. Are you still good with it? I am running 4.9.1 but there's really not much difference from 4.9.0 so I just opted to no-need-to-test.