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).