Re: Speaking of Fedora and Sawfish

[James Ralston <qralston+ml sawfish andrew cmu edu>]

On 2011-04-05 at 14:03-06 Michal Jaegermann <michal harddata com> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 01, 2011 at 02:47:36PM -0400, James Ralston wrote:
> 
> > On 2011-03-31 at 13:45-04 Christopher X Candreva <chris westnet com> wrote:
> > 
> > > Has anyone started looking at what we'll have to do to keep
> > > useing Sawfish under Fedora 15 / Gnome 3, when Gnome Shell
> > > replaces use of a window manger and the panel?
> > 
> > I don't think this will be possible.  The entire point of Gnome
> > Shell is that it combines the functionality of the panel, window
> > manager, and notification daemon.
> 
> "Combines" and "functionality" is way too optimistic description.

No, it is precisely the correct description: if you are running
gnome-shell, there *is no* separate window manager process, there *is
no* separate gnome-panel process, and there *is no* separate
notification-daemon process.  The single gnome-process replaces all
three processes, and provides a superset of the functionality they
provide.

> Only this is not the point.  Fedora does not ban, or at least not
> yet, other window managers and XFCE, for example, still works.

Fedora ships *many* window managers, including the humble twm.
Fedora, if anything, encourages multiple window managers.

GNOME is the entity that is placing additional restrictions on window
managers.  If you want to run GNOME, you need a GNOME-compatible
window manager.  And if you want to run GNOME 3, you need a window
manager compatible with GNOME 3.

> So the question is how to make sawfish a replacement of Gnome Shell
> without requiring to start it "by hand".  Other examples show that
> this is possible.

sawfish 1.8.0 cannot be used as the *starting* window manager for the
latest GNOME 3 release (in "fallback mode").  But letting GNOME start
with metacity and then running "sawfish --replace" works.

> > Yes.  "Fallback mode" is essentially "GNOME Classic": gnome-panel,
> > a window manager (metacity), and a notification daemon.
> 
> Not that much with functionality stripped out but I am not sure how
> this is relevant.

It's relevant because you must run in fallback mode to be able to run
a separate window manager process.  Otherwise, gnome-shell subsumes
the window manager functionality and will not let you replace it.