Re: reviving sawfish development.

[Janek Kozicki <janek_listy wp pl>]

John Harper said:     (by the date of Tue, 26 Jun 2007 09:59:57 -0700)

Hello John

Yes, I know that talking is cheap. Please however understand that
there should be a difference between:

A. Project being dead
B. Project being finished. 


1. A finished/complete project should still follow the current
   development trends: a composite extension is missing in sawfish.
   I just want to be able to control the window transparency using for
   instance ctrl-shift-scroller.

2. There was an attempt to add support for tabs in sawfish by writing a
   plugin. This attempt was so-so succesfull, because the author said
   that sawfish simply does not support tabs, and his plugin is a
   workaround around sawfish limitations using some lisp hacking.

3. when sawfish is restarted all windows lose their position and
   mainly move to the current viewport or the first viewport. But some
   even move outside the desktop limits to some random position.
   (using xinerama, if that matters)

The most promising thing for me (as a user) is that Ian Zimmerman
declared to work on the first two points (IIRC he is more interested
in the second one, currently). And allowing him to do so in a widely
appreciated manner will really encourage him to spend some of his time.

On the contrary, not supporting him to do so is not a good/nice
way to cooperate with people.


> But if someone wants to create an active branch in the  
> gnome svn repository and work on it, that's fine with me.
> If any changes get enough testing coverage and look sane,
> they can be merged back into the trunk,

Yes! That's the spirit. Create a branch, and allow him to work there.
We better avoid making a fork in separate repository, becaue this may
lead to too much fragmentation and additional problems with merging.


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

except tabs support. It is missing in the sawfish core. Uhh, and xgl too ;)



I'm glad that by this post I have raised some more attention
(especially from you) and I belive that we will manage to get
something done like releasing current SVN as sawfish 2.0 ;-)) It will
allow and encourage all the linux distributions to make a new package
for sawfish. Also, since many distributions (eg. debian) maintain
their own patches that let sawfish compile on that system - you will
be finally able to take those patches and add them to SVN trunk.


best regards

PS: are you using sawfish on your desktop?
-- 
Janek Kozicki                                                         |