Re: Minutes of Gnome 2 release team meeting (late): 2002-05-17

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Malcolm Tredinnick">

> In the past, I know that the Docs team chose a window manager and a theme
> to use for screenshots so that everything looked consistent.  However, I
> thought the idea was that anything complying with a particular window
> manager spec was meant to work. However, I'm a bit unclear as to what
> being the "official" window manager means, if anything, beyond the fact
> that it will be shipped by default by some groups (although, for example,
> Sun seem to have indicated they won't be).

The GNOME Project itself ships Sawfish (cf. the modules list). That's enough
to make it 'official' [a] beyond any assistance with compatibility and such
that has gone on in the past.

For 2.0.0, we'll be shipping both [b]. In future, we may not.

  [ For all the free love and window managers goals we had in the past, it
  makes sense for GNOME to 'adopt' a window manager, and try to make sure
  it's in a sane state so that GNOME distributors will want to ship it too.
  
  Remember that for the most part, GNOME just ships code; distributors ship
  binaries for users. That's how it worked with Sawfish for most of 1.x, but
  it's not getting enough love to keep distributors and users happy.
  
  I'd wager that most GNOME 2 testers have been using metacity or Sawfish
  1.x (which won't work all that well with the GNOME 2.0 Desktop, despite
  the obvious ui and library issues, so it's not a long term solution).
  
  Note that none of this means that we should consciously dump the ability
  to use alternative window managers. We can't *support* it very well, but
  anything that works with WM-SPEC should work with G2D. ]

- Jeff

[a] 'official' has never meant 'exclusive'.
[b] Sawfish as default, Metacity as a preview. [c]
[c] I didn't use numbers because it would be confusing.

-- 
   It makes perfect sense. If you're a narcissistic arsehole spawned from   
                            a curdled gene pool.