Enabling compositing

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Brian J. Tarricone schrieb:
> On 10/11/2005 1:25 PM, Foxy wrote:
> 
>>>well, it is implemented in some way in xcompmgr I guess. At least in 
>>>Gnome with xcompmgr you have all those things visible. Only the 
>>>background is transparent. It has its ow bugs though. Some icons in the 
>>>notification area still has background.
> 
> 
> While I haven't used gnome-panel in quite a while, the last
> implementation of "transparency" there wasn't real transparency.  They
> just took a snapshot of what was under the panel and applied it as the
> background of the panel (basically the same thing most "transparent"
> terminal emulators do).  The new Xfce panel uses true transparency, and
> there's no way to tell the compositor (using the current method) what
> transparency to use for different parts of the window.
> 
> Now, I believe there might be a way to do this by using ARGB windows,
> and masking the panel window's background with a semi-transparent
> pixmap.  Or something.  I don't know.  Either way, the implementation is
> not going to be easy or maintainable, and it probably won't work very
> well either.
> 
> At any rate, the point of the variable transparency isn't to make the
> panel 100% transparent.  That's pretty useless, as you yourself noted;

Well, that was my fault. I proposed to allow 100%, before I had tested
the panel with composite extension. Now that I have tried it, I must say
that I was totally wrong and 95% really was enough. There absolutely is
no sense in completely hiding a panel. I had expected the panel to
behave like Foxy described (=> like gnome-panel) but since that's not
true, we could perhaps revert this change?

Regards,
Jannis