Re: Package addition proposals

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Ian Peters <itp ximian com> writes:

> On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 08:07:26PM -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> > 
> > * sawfish
> > 
> > Nearly everyone uses sawfish with GNOME, and it's by far the window
> > manager with the GNOME integration. It's the de facto default GNOME
> > window manager, let's go ahead and make that de jure. Sawfish depends
> > on rep-gtk and librep. I suggest we include rep-gtk in GNOME, but not
> > librep, since including language bindings is in GNOME tradition, but
> > not including langauge implementations. However, we should put librep
> > in the same area where we have libgif and libdb and the like -
> > libraries needed for gnome that users might not already have, but
> > which are not part of GNOME per se.
> 
> Maciej,
> 
> I'm a little concerned about this one now that I think about it.  In
> the past, GNOME's position has been window manager agnostic, with a
> set of GNOME wm hints constituting integration.  Now, with the release
> of the freedesktop.org spec, it makes more sense than ever to stick
> with this position and say that window managers that comply with the
> spec are good GNOME window managers.

Having been around at the time, I think this was political mainly due
to the existence of multiple popular window managers with no de facto
standard. Enlightenment came the closest, but it really did not
integrate with GNOME very well.

I think there has always been a bit of a problem as a result of this,
which is that GNOME ends up not shipping a complete desktop. We were
willing to accept that cost for political reasons, but I think Sawfish
is so clearly the overwhelming de facto default GNOME window manager
that the political reasons don't really apply any more.

> From this viewpoint, it makes more sense to make sawfish part of the
> extra apps release than part of the core GNOME 1.4 release.  I just
> don't want window managers forced to emulate sawfish behaviour that is
> not in the official spec to be considered a good GNOME window manager.
> 

My proposal is to include Sawfish as the default GNOME window manager,
not the reference implementation of a GNOME window manager. GNOME
libraries and apps should still be written to the spec, not to
Sawfish.

However, I'm willing to wait for further discussion on this.

 - Maciej