window managers

[Stuart Children]

Hey

On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 03:29, Havoc Pennington wrote: 
> I'm triaging my bugs and there are a few sawfish issues that I know I
> won't get around to fixing. Also at this point I think most people
> wanting a more featureful WM are using a more maintained one

Yes, that's my impression. Certainly I've not recommended Sawfish when
people have asked me for something "better" than Metacity.

> 1) if we have a random more-features WM in Core, I think it should
> probably be one of the more maintained ones instead of Sawfish

Agreed. If a WM was added to Core I would say just go for the most
compliant one that has a good development team and simply the most
users. I think picking out a clear winner would be impossible though. So
I don't think one should be added...

> 2) maybe the right path instead is to put extra WMs in Extras and only
> the full desktop envs - gnome, kde, xfce, and classic (twm/xterm) - in
> Core

Definitely agreed. Once Extras exists in a better form then any WM
that's simple enough to package by itself will get supplied by the
community. With Extras obvious to any end user and easy to use, then all
the WMs will be available and everybody's happy. Desktop environments
that require not only a suite of packages but tighter integration with
the rest of the system should be in Core.

> 3) either way, pretty sure someone other than me should be maintaining
> the package

I've no interest in sawfish, sorry. :) However, as I mentioned on
fedora-devel, I have enlightenment packages on the way.

What does need to happen is for the system to be able to integrate with
any random WM better. There are two areas I'd like to see work on with
regard to this:

1) X/DE startup - it's currently a nightmare to follow. I think several
of the scripts could be improved. Certainly hardcoded parts should be
removed. See the "GDM Suggestion" thread for one particular item.

2) Making the DEs more tolerant of swapping out parts of their system
(like the WM) with compatible alternatives. Also things like not having
to run the gnome-panel (I did read some discussion on this, but didn't
keep tracking it - perhaps this is in-hand). Personally I use many GTK
based apps and I love some of the benefits a GNOME environment gives me
(consistent fonts being a basic example). However, I've no need of
particular services and definitely not of heavy applications (ie: the
panel and nautilus).

-- 
Stuart