Re: gnome compliant window managers

[Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow alum mit edu>]

Michael Fulbright <msf@redhat.com> writes:

> sds@goems.com said:
> > RH people do not consider this to be a bug (see http://
> > developer.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1503): 
> 
> We have chosen to use Enlightenment as our default window manager because
> in our experience it is the most GNOME compliant wm, and it has a very
> nice GUI tool to configure its behavior. It is installed by default in
> the Starbuck release.
> 

Hi,

I realize there is no plot to force particular WMs on people or
anything, but this does seem like a technical problem to me which
could probably be fixed.

Basically, people need to install Enlightenment (and all it's myriad
dependencies, some of which are not, at least currently, Gnome
dependencies per se) to be able to install Gnome from the RPMs unless
they build Gnome themselves, and even if they configure Gnome to use a
different window manager later, they can't uninstall Enlightenment
because the gnome-core package depends on it.

Again, although I realize this is all done with the best of
intentions, and gnome-core is in fact currently set up to build so
that it needs a specific window manager specified at configure-time, I
personally think it would be nice to find a technical solution either
in terms of modifing gnome-core to deal with this kind of thing more
gracefully, or in terms of the way the packaging is done, assuming
Gnome wants to maintain a nominal appearance of window manager
independece. I know it must be possible, because Red Hat has many
places where one package depends on one of several others being
present, through the use of the "Provides" RPM directive.

In fact the way it is set up now is kind of reminiscent of the way
Windows comes with Internet Explorer, and although you can install
another browser and use that, you still won't be able to remove IE. I
know the intention isn't as sinister in the Gnome/Enlightenment case,
but still I have seen posts from KDE guys claiming that Gnome isn't
_really_ window manager independent, etc etc so the whole thing is
kind of bad PR.

Personally, I don't care too much, I can spare the disk space for
packages I don't personally use, but the situation as is seems to
annoy some users on a philosophical level.

I am also curious what other OS distributors (Debian, FreeBSD, etc)
have done in terms of dependencies between the various gnome packages
and WM's. Have you made gnome-core dependent on a specific window
manager, or have you found some more clever solution?

Hoping to shed light rather than heat on this issue,

Maciej Stachowiak