Re: Requirements in release

[Christopher Roy Bratusek <zanghar freenet de>]

Am Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:42:51 +0900 (JST)
schrieb Teika Kazura <teika lavabit com>:

> On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 12:51:28 +0200, Christopher Roy Bratusek wrote:
> > schrieb Daniel Fetchinson <fetchinson googlemail com>:
> >>
> >> Why can't the packaged archive contain a reasonable configure
> >> script to begin with?
> >> [...]
> >> In any case the user experience could be increased greatly if the
> >> installation of sawfish would not involve all sorts of trickery,
> >> but the simple
> >> ./configure
> >> make
> >> make install
> >> 
> >> cycle on each of the dependencies (librep, rep-gtk, sawfish).
> >
> > ... well, normally it is shipped, somehow I forgot it for 0.18.6
> > (...)
> 
> Daniel Fetchinson is right.
> 

yep.

> Chris, I'm sorry that we may rely too much on you, but the release is

:/ sometimes I don't know if that is because you trust me that much, or
if you are moving away from sawfish, just like Sven (and others) did.

(Ehh, you is plural here, not you as in Teika)

> important, especially "big ones" like sawfish-1.5. I wonder if you
> could prepare, say, a checklist of release procedure. (Of course it
> can contain a line or two of "Press Teika to do this tiresome job." I
> can't refuse. Ouch ;) Because there's an interval between big version
> changes, it's easy to forget this and that and etc., etc. It can also
> help at the maintainer-ship transfer.
> 

Well, this checklist does (imaginarly) exist, but is not failsafe, I'm
just happy that it "just" happened to rep-gtk 0.18.6, as there are only
changes to the specfile (nothing else) and 0.18.4 is enough for
sawfish. It would have hurt much more on librep or sawfish. But of
course you're right, that this should not happen again.

...

> 
> One more thing I'd like to point out is that the news items are terse.
> Just a delay of two weeks or so can make it far better. Clearly what
> lacks though there should be is the tab usage.  In fact, I was upset
> by the 1.5 release, and I quickly fixed a small manual on wiki: 
> http://sawfish.wikia.com/wiki/Tab
> At least, there should be the pointer in news.texi to it. Please put
> it on 1.5.1 / 1.6.
> (Yes, focus-revert is important, too, but to make it short, I skip it
> now.)
> Rewinding time a week, I was about to write the last cleanup of
> NEWS for 1.5.
> 

I'm sorry Teika, I wanted to do the release finally, as it already
delayed 4/5 weeks. But well, any improvement on this is -of course-
welcome, and for the next time: 1.6.0 is definitively to be released on
the 22nd of December, so feature freeze is end of November and we can
then better handle stuff like that. For 1.5.x which is "only" a bugfix
series this may not be that important (except that stuff from 1.5.0
that's to be improved).

> For ordinary softwares, I expect things go out-of-box, or at least
> there accompanies a decent manual. If not, I curse, "d***, [...]".
> 
> Because I like sawfish, this is not the case for me on sawfish,
> but PLEASE LISTEN, many users swear, and for them sawfish is not
> reputable.
> 

You're right.

> Popularity is the power. Some reports, what's good and bad (or bugs).
> They help. Some subscribe ML. A few contribute in ML. A few of few 
> develops.
> 
> Anyway, thanks a lot for all. I was happy when I knew Sawfish was
> resurrected. Now we see a boom come. Another will come.
> 

A boom? You mean much more Sawfish users? Sorry, but if you're thinking
this way, I think you're wrong:

GNOME 3 will not allow to use sawfish anymore! The GNOME Shell will
only work with this ultra-ugly MetaCity shit. So only KDE will be a
Desktop usable with sawfish. So we either wait for Timo to get KDE4
running, check if we need to do some improvements for better KDE4
Support and go trying to get some KDE-Users to use sawfish,
or build our own desktop, nothing like GNOME/KDE, but like LXDE.
Standalone Windowmanagers are not suitable for most users theese days.

Oh well, and in the last half year there have more unsubscriptions than
subscriptions, but more users are monitoring librep/rep-gtk/sawfish on
sf.net, the IRC is pratically dead (I only have had 2 (in words: two)
discussions there the last half year), so I would say: The userbase did
not change that much.

Common things noobs think about sawfish (not a joke):

- Too many functions, which no one needs (the argument that you just
  don't know them and therefore can't say if you would need them is not
  of interest)
- Bad Usability (well this is that sawfish-ui is shit therefore
  sawfish is also shit thingy)
- It's not part of most Distros - can't be good

Of course this is only a group of users and not all.

This may sound pesimistic, but: I absolutely don't care how many users
are using Sawfish, for me it's the Ultimate Windowmanager, regardless
of anyone else, so you don't have to fear to get rid of me :p

> With best regards,
> Teika (Teika kazura)
> 

Chris