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.

Summary

Crash Fixes

  • 179077: drag-and-drop between windows by cover switch alt-tab causes apps to crash
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit
  • 303450: kwin glxgears crash
    This change will be available in version 4.9.0
    Git Commit

Bug Fixes

  • 296065: Lanczos Filter broken after screen size changes
    This change will be available in version 4.9 RC 2
    Git Commit
  • 297864: ThumbnailItem allows upscaling of Windows
    This change will be available in version 4.9 RC 2
    Git Commit
  • 302164: the efficiency of drawing in kwin 4.9 beta2 is lower than 4.8
  • 303096: Logout effect completely broken
    This change will be available in version 4.9 RC 2
    Git Commit
  • 303200: Incorrect signal connects for activities in WorkspaceWrapper
    This change will be available in version 4.9 RC 2
    Git Commit

New Features

    Tasks

    • 303090: Remove Tiling Support From KWin
      This change will be available in version 4.10
      Git Commit