Ubuntuland

According to information from upstream compiz 0.7 will be ready for the timeframe
of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. compiz will introduce an object system and abstract the output, allowing output plugins based on XRender or OpenGL.

The XRender-plugin will be used when OpenGL is not available or the OpenGL-support on the machine running compiz is missing some feature or extension.

To ensure the smooth operation of compiz as the default window-manager the integration work into the desktop has to be emphasized.

The tools for controlling appearance, workspaces, keyboard and sessions have to be made more compiz-aware. The default behaviour (actions triggered via keyboard-shortcuts or by popping up dialogs) of compiz is not to be different from metacity.

It has to be taken care of that shortcuts of applications are not overridden by compiz. Interaction with the underlying framework (RandR) provided by Xorg has to be ensured so hotplugging of displays, screen-rotations and resolution-changes work without causing compiz to quit or crash.

Users switching from metacity to compiz (e.g. updating from Dapper/6.06 LTS to Hardy/8.04 LTS) will expect all learned keyboard-shortcuts from metacity to result in the same behaviour under compiz. It would alienate people, if they were required to learn new keyboard-shortcut to perform the same actions or if known keyboard-shortcuts would no longer result in the same behaviour.

People who are upgrading from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 will expect their settings for compiz to be preserved.

The session-management users of Dapper 6.06 are used to, has to work the same way under compiz. This is a functionality that must not be dropped!

At the time users recognize the improved desktop-rendering (provided via compiz), they naturally become curious and want to investigate its additional features. These have to be "handed" to them in the most simple way possible, without them being required to read any manuals or web-forums in order to get to know new functionality.

New features of the underlying Xorg should not cause compiz to crash or switch off (fallback to metacity). It has to be made sure that additional functionality provided via RandR (monitor-hotplugging, screenrotation) does not break the compiz-rendered desktop.

More technical users, who wish to tweak specific properties or behaviours of compiz, would expect a streamlined graphical-frontend for doing so, due to the integrated nature of compiz into the desktop. Forcing them to something like gconf-editor would cause a break in terms of UI-integration and therefore has to be avoided.

A user is running 8.04 on a notebook with a supported GPU (thus compiz is enabled by default) and has to give a presentation. She/he connects the notebook to the projector and expects the output on the projector to be either cloned or an additional monitor depeding on the settings. For this to work compiz should not be required to be disabled for the presentation.

A new compiz release 0.7.0 is now available from:

 http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/individual/app/compiz-0.7.0.tar.gz

 which can be verified with:

 http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/individual/app/compiz-0.7.0.tar.gz.sha1 

59b019b6cd627140f44006876ee2b0c3ab92f150  compiz-0.7.0.tar.gz

 http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/individual/app/compiz-0.7.0.tar.gz.sha1.asc 

(signed by Dennis Kasprzyk)

 Additionally, a git clone of the source tree:

 git clone git://git.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/app/compiz

 will include a signed compiz-0.7.0 tag which points to a commit named: a6763350ba9a578e9df6adbdb7eadc174015c960

 which can be verified with: git verify-tag compiz-0.7.0

 and can be checked out with a command such as: git checkout -b build compiz-0.7.0