Re: Sawfish website revisted

[Fruhwirth Clemens <clemens endorphin org>]

On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 09:42 +0000, Jonathan Koren wrote:

> I think we (the active sawfish community) should create a new
>  sourceforge project named "sawfish". 

I agree with most of the things you've said. However, a very basic
ingredient for a vital free software project is still: work.

The sawfish community - it seems to me - is loosely connected;
infrequent traffic on the mailing lists, some hacking here, some hacking
there. Being a maintainer myself, I know that my attention level is a
really volatile thing. But unfortunately, I'm the bottleneck for my
projects. That is project-activity = my-activity. 

The ideas of this mail are about removing this bottlenecks by enabling
the community to do more work, so that 
project-activity = max(contributor's-activity) among all contributors.

Here they are:

1. Make the efforts on Sawfish more visible by making the web pages
community-driven. 

The idea is that the person that writes code can also advertise it on
the Sawfish web page. The author of a piece of code will have a higher
intention to publish information about it, so he should be the one that
can actually do that - not a webmaster who doesn't need/use/like the
code anyway. This approach works well for KDE. http://www.kde-look.org/
has about 23 million page views/month.

Being the new owner of the Sawfish Wiki at http://sawfish.endorphin.org
I found it quite nice to work with PmWiki and there is even an emacs
extension to work with PmWiki. 

Personally, I disliked Wikis because they look like Wikis with all their
WikifiedNamesOneCannotRead. But PmWiki can be customized easily and I
volunteer to create a basic website and layout that shouldn't look like
a Wiki at all. Have a look at the URL above and look what's done
already.

You will see a wikified version of the sourceforge page as soon as JH
gave permission to copy his content. 

2. Two ideas for Sawfish code and releases:

2a. Leave the core sawfish release as they are and create a sawfish
extension release pack that comes with a variety of maintained Sawfish
extensions and goodies. This liberates JH from managing and releasing
3rd party code, but still we can provide the users with more recent
features he expects to find in a modern window manager. 

However, the one who releases this code pack will be the next
bottleneck.

2b. Distributed development. arch [1] and darcs [2] are two tools for
distributed source management. This won't deliver code to the user right
away, but at least we can use each others code more easily.

-- 
Fruhwirth Clemens - http://clemens.endorphin.org 
for robots: sp4mtrap endorphin org