Re: Requirements in release

[Christopher Roy Bratusek <zanghar freenet de>]

Am Tue, 7 Jul 2009 11:23:12 -0700
schrieb Daniel Fetchinson <fetchinson googlemail com>:

> >> >> Why can't the packaged archive contain a reasonable configure
> >> >> script to begin with?
> >> >> [...]
> >> >> In any case the user experience could be increased greatly if
> >> >> the installation of sawfish would not involve all sorts of
> >> >> trickery, but the simple
> >> >> ./configure
> >> >> make
> >> >> make install
> >> >>
> >> >> cycle on each of the dependencies (librep, rep-gtk, sawfish).
> >> >
> >> > ... well, normally it is shipped, somehow I forgot it for 0.18.6
> >> > (...)
> >>
> >> Daniel Fetchinson is right.
> >>
> >
> > yep.
> >
> >> Chris, I'm sorry that we may rely too much on you, but the release
> >> is
> >
> > :/ sometimes I don't know if that is because you trust me that
> > much, or if you are moving away from sawfish, just like Sven (and
> > others) did.
> >
> > (Ehh, you is plural here, not you as in Teika)
> >
> >> important, especially "big ones" like sawfish-1.5. I wonder if you
> >> could prepare, say, a checklist of release procedure. (Of course it
> >> can contain a line or two of "Press Teika to do this tiresome
> >> job." I can't refuse. Ouch ;) Because there's an interval between
> >> big version changes, it's easy to forget this and that and etc.,
> >> etc. It can also help at the maintainer-ship transfer.
> >>
> >
> > Well, this checklist does (imaginarly) exist, but is not failsafe,
> > I'm just happy that it "just" happened to rep-gtk 0.18.6, as there
> > are only changes to the specfile (nothing else) and 0.18.4 is
> > enough for sawfish. It would have hurt much more on librep or
> > sawfish. But of course you're right, that this should not happen
> > again.
> >
> > ...
> >
> >>
> >> One more thing I'd like to point out is that the news items are
> >> terse. Just a delay of two weeks or so can make it far better.
> >> Clearly what lacks though there should be is the tab usage.  In
> >> fact, I was upset by the 1.5 release, and I quickly fixed a small
> >> manual on wiki: http://sawfish.wikia.com/wiki/Tab
> >> At least, there should be the pointer in news.texi to it. Please
> >> put it on 1.5.1 / 1.6.
> >> (Yes, focus-revert is important, too, but to make it short, I skip
> >> it now.)
> >> Rewinding time a week, I was about to write the last cleanup of
> >> NEWS for 1.5.
> >>
> >
> > I'm sorry Teika, I wanted to do the release finally, as it already
> > delayed 4/5 weeks. But well, any improvement on this is -of course-
> > welcome, and for the next time: 1.6.0 is definitively to be
> > released on the 22nd of December, so feature freeze is end of
> > November and we can then better handle stuff like that. For 1.5.x
> > which is "only" a bugfix series this may not be that important
> > (except that stuff from 1.5.0 that's to be improved).
> >
> >> For ordinary softwares, I expect things go out-of-box, or at least
> >> there accompanies a decent manual. If not, I curse, "d***, [...]".
> >>
> >> Because I like sawfish, this is not the case for me on sawfish,
> >> but PLEASE LISTEN, many users swear, and for them sawfish is not
> >> reputable.
> >>
> >
> > You're right.
> >
> >> Popularity is the power. Some reports, what's good and bad (or
> >> bugs). They help. Some subscribe ML. A few contribute in ML. A few
> >> of few develops.
> >>
> >> Anyway, thanks a lot for all. I was happy when I knew Sawfish was
> >> resurrected. Now we see a boom come. Another will come.
> >>
> >
> > A boom? You mean much more Sawfish users? Sorry, but if you're
> > thinking this way, I think you're wrong:
> >
> > GNOME 3 will not allow to use sawfish anymore! The GNOME Shell will
> > only work with this ultra-ugly MetaCity shit. So only KDE will be a
> > Desktop usable with sawfish. So we either wait for Timo to get KDE4
> > running, check if we need to do some improvements for better KDE4
> > Support and go trying to get some KDE-Users to use sawfish,
> > or build our own desktop, nothing like GNOME/KDE, but like LXDE.
> > Standalone Windowmanagers are not suitable for most users theese
> > days.
> 
> Well, I actually have been using sawfish standalone without gnome or
> kde since it appeared in redhat. And I absolutely would like to keep
> using it as such in the future, regardless of what gnome and kde comes
> up with and I also don't care about so called minimalist desktops like
> lxde. I think sawfish by itself is just great and if it ain't broken
> don't fix it. The only extra thing I use is a trayer application,
> either one by the name 'trayer' or 'stalonetray'.
> 
> > Oh well, and in the last half year there have more unsubscriptions
> > than subscriptions, but more users are monitoring
> > librep/rep-gtk/sawfish on sf.net, the IRC is pratically dead (I
> > only have had 2 (in words: two) discussions there the last half
> > year), so I would say: The userbase did not change that much.
> >
> > Common things noobs think about sawfish (not a joke):
> >
> > - Too many functions, which no one needs (the argument that you just
> >   don't know them and therefore can't say if you would need them is
> > not of interest)
> > - Bad Usability (well this is that sawfish-ui is shit therefore
> >   sawfish is also shit thingy)
> > - It's not part of most Distros - can't be good
> >
> > Of course this is only a group of users and not all.
> >
> > This may sound pesimistic, but: I absolutely don't care how many
> > users are using Sawfish, for me it's the Ultimate Windowmanager,
> > regardless of anyone else, so you don't have to fear to get rid of
> > me :p
> 
> I think what would attract the right kinds of users is a clear message
> about the intended audience. It should be clear from the project page
> who are expected to use sawfish and for whom probably it's not a good
> choice. If this policy is clear then the effort can go into convincing
> the right kinds of users and no effort will be wasted on preaching to
> people who will not care anyway. For example it might be the case that
> gnome 3 is not compatible with sawfish anymore, but is this a problem?
> I don't think so. I don't know how many gnome users use sawfish but
> I'd think much more are using sawfish standalone.
> 

Well Sawfish used to be the GNOME Window Manager, so there's still a
bunch of them using GNOME. But well who's the "intended audience" of
sawfish? I would say: Advanced Users who want to have full control over
their WindowManager. Mainly, but not limited to theese.

> An example: I'm pretty sure much more people use vim in text mode than
> in graphical mode together with the mouse. Vim has some graphical
> features but the main development effort and marketing effort goes
> into the text mode version, which is considered to be the 'real vim'.
> And vim is really attractive and great and popular among these kinds
> of users.
> 

I'm also a Vim User. Textmode of course :)

> Similarly, the main effort I think should go into making sawfish as
> good as possible for standalone mode because these users are the
> natural audience who are really committed to sawfish.
> 

Of course, this "Desktop Environment" thing I spoke about is exactly
this, while DE does mean: panel (with menu/notificationarea the later
is important for me/pager/windowlist), background setter, support for
desktop icons, those 3 without relying on 3rdparties. But well, of
course it's already all possible with 3rdparties. Perhaps it's just my
point of view.

> Looking forward to a long lifespan for sawfish!
> 

You're looking into a shiny future :)

> Cheers,
> Daniel
> 
>