Comment 3 for bug 533758

I decided to have a look into implementing this as a little project to learn my way around gnome programming. Its a little rough around the edges, and I've temporarily broken RTL languages swapping the button layouts, as it pulled in a lot of dependencies into libmetacity-private.

If something like this would be a reasonable solution, I'm happy to put more work into cleaning it up and integrating as a patch to the metacity package, as well as implementing it in compiz.

Another issue is whether to add it as a spec in a new version of metacity theme (version 3), or just an extra piece in a version 1 theme, as it doesn't seem to break anything...

So, the implementation right now is to have an element in the theme file like this:

<button_layout value="menu:minimize,maximize,close"/>

If the theme does not have that element, it defaults back to the string located in gconf (/apps/metacity/general/button_layout). There is also a new key in gconf called force_button_layout, which if true, forces metacity to ignore all themes' button layouts.

So attached is this rough patch to the git version of metacity, and it currently works on my machine!