Re: reviving sawfish development.

[Timo Korvola <Timo Korvola iki fi>]

John Harper <jsh unfactored org> writes:
> On Jun 26, 2007, at 4:07 AM, Janek Kozicki wrote:
>> - there are some patches submitted to the list (even some time ago),
>>  which did not found their way to the SVN repository.
>
> examples?

Here is mine:
<URL:http://mail.gnome.org/archives/sawfish-list/2007-March/msg00008.html>.

> When I see bug-fix patches that are obviously correct, I try
> to remember to commit them

I hope you also give some consideration to non-obvious patches.  It is
hard to provide obvious fixes to non-obvious bugs.

> I think it's better to err on the side of caution here, by its nature
> sawfish is a hard-to-understand project (arcane X details, multiple
> languages, multiple OSes, etc), and so is very easy to introduce bugs
> into.

Window management indeed involves a bit more X details - arcane and
modern - than regular applications.  But there are quite a few window
managers out there, and quite a few applications with extension
languages.  Portability among at least reasonably POSIXish OSes is the
norm rather than an exception.  So I don't think Sawfish is that
special - it is also easy to introduce bugs into other programs.

> Given all that, I consider sawfish "finished" . bugs can be fixed, but
> extra functionality should be added as lisp extensions outside the
> core project.

Whenever possible.  There has been talk, cheap as it may be, on
compositing support.  Although I am not familiar with the details, I
expect it would require extending the C core quite a bit.

> So that's why I think bug-fix mode is better than active development
> for sawfish.

Many projects do both.

-- 
	Timo Korvola		<URL:http://www.iki.fi/tkorvola>