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pantheon-wallpaper won't make it

 

Hello everybody,

it's hard to admit it, but pantheon-wallpaper probably won't make it
for Luna. It has dreadful bugs like
https://bugs.launchpad.net/pantheon-wallpaper/+bug/814948 or
https://bugs.launchpad.net/pantheon-wallpaper/+bug/886633 and no
active maintainer.

Moreover, I think it's no longer relevant. It was started back when
Nautilus was drawing wallpaper. Nowadays GNOME wallpaper is drawn by
gnome-settings-daemon, so the advantage of being standalone is no
longer relevant. Pantheon-wallpaper uses Cairo for rendering and
therefore its transitions are smoother, but I've compared them on a
laptop back from 2005 and I can't say pantheon-wallpaper is *much*
smoother. In addition, GNOME implementation supports interfaces about
which we haven't even dreamed about yet, e.g. libvte
semi-transparency, Ubuntu lock screen, etc, and its way of storing
configs is already widely supported.

Smooth transitions are a job of GPU drivers. Client-side workarounds
for that are not a good idea. GDK pixbuf which is [probably] used by
gnome-settings-daemon is more likely to get performance improvements
from GPU drivers than Cairo. Latest Intel drivers boost its
performance many times compared to previous versions, while Cairo
performance is largely unchanged.

Maintaining a custom solution for the sake of improvement
opportunities doesn't make much sense either. Most features like
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/pantheon-wallpaper/+spec/focus-blur
should be implemented as standalone daemons telling the wallpaper what
to do, not inside wallpaper service to bloat it with potentially
unused features.
And it's very unlikely that we'll drop gnome-settings-daemon in the
foreseeable future, so the original problem which led to creation of
pantheon-wallpaper is extremely unlikely to reappear.

Given all of the above, I propose dropping pantheon-wallpaper
completely. It's not worth the effort.

--
Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff


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