Metacity and terminals

[Ron Yorston]

I installed fc5t3 last night, mostly without incident.  I haven't had
much time to use it yet so there are one or two things I'll need to
look into and may report later.  However, one immediate thing.

There's an experimental patch to metacity that causes GUI applications
started from a terminal to appear underneath the terminal window.
Applications started from a launcher appear on top, as before.  The
upstream rationale for this and the Red Hat Bugzilla entry for it are
here:

   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326159
   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=178389

I'm a developer.  I spend a lot of time working in terminal windows
doing things like 'vi prog.c; make; ./prog'.  Once I've typed './prog'
I expect my sparkly new program to appear so that I can see if my evil
kludge has finally nailed the latest bug the users have been (quite
unjustifiably) complaining about.  I don't want to have to drag the
sparkly new program up from underneath my terminal window.

The first time this happens it's a surprise.  The second time it's
irrirating.  After the twentieth time I'll be saying Very Rude Things
Indeed about metacity, its maintainer, his family and their pets.  And
I'm sure Elijah wouldn't want that.

I really can't think of any case where I'd want to start an application
from a terminal window and not have it appear on top.  For the way I
work the new behaviour is always wrong and it isn't even possible to
turn it off.

I'd really, really, really like to see this experimental patch
reverted.  Or at least have some way to configure it, preferably with
the old behaviour as default.

Ron