Re: Status?

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

>Someone from the gnome-list mailing list was wondering about the time
>frame of a released specification. Can we set a tentative deadline for
>this? Perhaps like October 1st?

Sounds good to me.

>I'm personally wondering what people are up to, as this list has gone from
>a high volume of mails down to all of 2 messages since this last weekend.
>What are people's feelings about this project, what can we do to make it
>better and come together more cohesively?]

I'm sure everyone else was hard at work coding, but I was just licking my 
wounds after that scrap about pagers.  :)  Sorry about that, everyone.

>Does anyone want to work on developing a second copy of the draft, or does
>common consensus indicate that I should work on that? Please let me know
>what I can do to help in this effort.

If nobody else has written a second draft, I'll put forward my ideas. I think 
the second draft should incorporate the suggestion (I can't remember who made 
it, sorry) of grouping the hints into structures (like the ICCCM and MWM 
hints). There should also be some guidelines on the use of messages which 
control the window manager (ie messages which are used by the pager), to
make it clear that applications should treat them as user hints rather than
programmer hints. The spec should also include a policy on duplication of 
features between the desktop environment and the window manager (things like 
launchers, taskbars, session managers and docks). I think one of the faults 
of the existing spec is that it is little more than a list of hints. We need 
to look at the role of the window manager under a desktop environment as well 
as working out the technical details of interaction.


Michael Rogers