Re: E and GNOME not the right way?

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

>I was wondering what the GNOME community thinks about this quote from
>Raster on Slashdot.
>
>"E is not part of the gnome project thus it clashes in several departments
>and will continue to do so"
>
>I understand that E's development team has an agenda that is not parallel
>with GNOME, and I respect that completely. I was wondering, what does this
>mean for GNOME and I have a couple of notes to make.
>
>1.) It appears RedHat is trying to make GNOME the default Window Manager
>for GNOME. This will not be feasible due to the way they will clash (E will
>eventually handle the desktop too if you don't know).  This will
>POTENTIALLY negatively effect GNOME if RedHat continues this way - There
>are many clashes alreayd with GNOME and E (i.e. right-clicking on your
>desktop would bring up an E and GMC menu). Any ideas on this?

Red Hat doesn't have to steer its Gnome setup towards a particular window
manager any more, since there are several Gnome-compliant window managers.
Users who choose E can blame themselves for any clashes/duplicated features.

>2.) Secondly, I think somebody writing a GNOME-specific window manager
>would be a great thing for the GNOME project. Basically, somebody to code a
>window manager that will 'fit' into the GNOME enviroment perfectly. This
>doesn't mean somebody HAS to use - hell, I don't think it should be
>included in gnome-core or gnome-libs (make it gnome-wm). A person can
>CHOOSE to use it, or to choose anything else.

There are at least two under way (GnoWM and mosquito).

>It seems at the moment that
>every WM has its own agenda, and with the lack of a clear GNOME WM
>specification (hopefully the WM-spec list will rectify this - anyone know a
>ballpark figure on this? (years, months, weeks?)) every WM has its own
>agenda and own features that could potentially clash with GNOME.

The new spec may include a "policy" on duplicated features (eg, switch off
all Gnome-duplicating features by default if Gnome is running). I'd
certainly like to see this, because it will allow something like E to
continue to be used under Gnome while the developers add cunning new
features for non-Gnome users.


Michael Rogers