Re: WM Extended Spec Summary, 6/21/99

[Matthias Ettrich <ettrich troll no>]

> * I've got some more touchups to do and contacts to make, but sometime in
> the near future I will be posting a notice on SlashDot, etc., announcing
> the purpose of this list, try to draw in any remaining elements that
> should be here and to raise the bar of public awareness of this project.

Please not. IMO we shall not announce it before the actual work was done.
Otherwise the work will suffer by too many people making too many comments with
too little background. It's easy to contact all window manager maintainers and
toolkit vendors, so there's no need for a wider audience. Personally, I don't
think we have the time to to discuss WM and toolkit design questions with people
who don't work in that realm. What makes it worse is that WMs are a kind of
delicious topic. Once you announce it in public, people will spam us with
things like "Make a hint for pie menus" etc.

As an alternative, we could of course allow subscription only on invitation.
Requirement is either work on a window manager, work on a toolkit or work on
the basic libraries of an application development framework.  I'd prefer
working in silence, though, since the nonsense that we will read on /. after
such an announcement will surely not increase my motivation ;-)

Matthias