Re: On Sawfish 1.9

[Christopher Roy Bratusek <nano tuxfamily org>]

Am 11.06.2011 02:23, schrieb Michal Maruska:
> Hello,
>
> > I'll meet Michal Maruska at IRC this weekend, and we'll begin merging then.
> > He said he'll write some mails
> > to the ML (on what should get higher prio and stuff)
> the emails will arrive a bit later, as I was busy all this week. And
> being offline for the next 10 days, the
> IRC meeting will happen only thereafter. However I git pullled&  will
> try to rebase my work.

No problem.

> Lately my thoughts (and my plans for the first email) have been around
> how to distribute releases.
> I use ubuntu and my personal PPAs (https://launchpad.net/~mmaruska). I
> also use gitorious (https://gitorious.org/~mmaruska [1])
>   as a central repository to synchronize between my workstations.
>
> I release often -- to fix bugs&  experiment with features -- (not
> specifically sawfish), and distribute
> through the PPA to a couple of people (by pinning with priority 1001,
> so my versions of standard packages are preferred).
> But I start to see the point of having the experimental&  stable branches:
> after a while I like to rewrite my git commits into logical branches&
> merges thereof.

The problem with releasing often is that given from the stats 
practically no one uses the release-candidates.
Indeed I was about to roll-out snapshots from 1.8.90 every 2 or 3 weeks 
(with all branches merged), to ease testing.

Given by the no of downloads from a stable (say 1.8.0) i'ts RC is only 
around 3-10% of downloads.

Devs and Contributors use GIT and there don't seem to be enough 
beta-testers around.
So some advertisement on some big site would be a good idea.

Back in Mar 2008 I wrote an article about SF on PL (pro-linux.de) and 
they (the readers) where surprised:
"Sawfish is still alive?" "Development restarted??". I guess our problem 
is, that we weren't simply of,
we where kicked out of GNOME, thus the no of ppl who read "Sawfish is 
dead" back then is much higher
than the no of ppl you read "Sawfish is alive again". For me it was just 
an accident. I was looking for more
infos why Sawfish died, and two weeks later I found the Mails from JSH 
and Janek.

We need some marketing, too, I guess.

> So, I am using this workflow:
>
> 1/  code&  git commit
> 2/ debuild --rootcmd=fakeroot --no-tgz-check&&  debi
> 3/ git push  to synchronize
>
> 3/ after a while, I want to release, so I have this sequence:
>
> git-dch  --release
> git add debian/changelog; git commit -m release
> git-buildpackage --git-tag "--git-debian-tag=experimental/%(version)s"
> &&  debi --debs-dir ../build-area/
> git-buildpackage -S&&  debrelease -S  --debs-dir=../build-area --dput
>   somewhere-ppa
>
> (admittely, i have my wrapper  mygit-buildpackage which adds the
> "--git-prebuild=./auto" if ./auto exists,
> to the invocation of git-buildpackage).  could be  autogen.sh as well.
>
> This way, I don't store in git  various files generated/provided by
> automake&co.  (config.*  ltmain. libtool install-sh etc.)
>
> I just generate them in the ./auto, so that they _are_ in the debian
> source package.
>
> ok, next time I will surely be sawfish specific, although what I care
> more is the migration from rep to some better Scheme
> possibly with JNI compatible interface).
>
> regards, Michal  and sorry for telling Chris at the last moment

Chris

> notes:
> [1]  I was planning to answer to Teika's  (Not Sawfish) Hand health
> and my "handy modifier" hack       with pointing at
> my  "fork" extensions to Xorg, but for lack of time ....