Re: Requirements in release

[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.

Well, I actually have been using sawfish standalone without gnome or
kde since it appeared in redhat. And I absolutely would like to keep
using it as such in the future, regardless of what gnome and kde comes
up with and I also don't care about so called minimalist desktops like
lxde. I think sawfish by itself is just great and if it ain't broken
don't fix it. The only extra thing I use is a trayer application,
either one by the name 'trayer' or 'stalonetray'.

> 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

I think what would attract the right kinds of users is a clear message
about the intended audience. It should be clear from the project page
who are expected to use sawfish and for whom probably it's not a good
choice. If this policy is clear then the effort can go into convincing
the right kinds of users and no effort will be wasted on preaching to
people who will not care anyway. For example it might be the case that
gnome 3 is not compatible with sawfish anymore, but is this a problem?
I don't think so. I don't know how many gnome users use sawfish but
I'd think much more are using sawfish standalone.

An example: I'm pretty sure much more people use vim in text mode than
in graphical mode together with the mouse. Vim has some graphical
features but the main development effort and marketing effort goes
into the text mode version, which is considered to be the 'real vim'.
And vim is really attractive and great and popular among these kinds
of users.

Similarly, the main effort I think should go into making sawfish as
good as possible for standalone mode because these users are the
natural audience who are really committed to sawfish.

Looking forward to a long lifespan for sawfish!

Cheers,
Daniel


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