Re: adoption of wm-spec

["Rob Hodges" <s323140 student uq edu au>]

> I was wondering who (if anyone) has started using the wm-spec. I know that 
> KDE-2 was using at least a draft of the spec, and that John Harper was 
> working on implementing it in Sawfish. It would be interesting to know how 
> these are going, and whether other people are using it.
> 
> Personally I'm especially interested in whether the core gnome libs will 
> move to the spec, and if so in which version of gnome. It seems essential 
> for the spec for the big projects to use the spec, otherwise there's no 
> chance of interoperability.

The big projects are Gnome and KDE, whose commitment to this spec
could hardly be in doubt.  I would think the same goes for the several
WM authors who have invested quite a bit of energy in the spec.  

But it's only very recently been finalised so it's to be expected that
the support is not there everywhere yet, and is a little fragile where
it is.  

I have a project ("stph") that provides a library for taskbar/pager
type apps to interact with spec-compliant WM's without requiring any
Xlib knowledge (it provides callbacks and convenience functions).
Previously it used the old Gnome spec; the wm-spec version is very
near to completion now.  I've received some interest and so with any
luck we'll be seeing a couple of such apps that may serve to highlight
any unforseen interoperability problems before too long.

I've been using the spec document and Sawfish for design and testing
respectively, and they differ a little, but I'll certainly be looking
to straighten that out before long.  Both the spec and the
implementation are teething; it's to be expected.

I'll let others talk about toolkit support but I wouldn't be too
worried about that either.  

It's early days yet.  The spec serves a real need (actually several
needs) and has no competition apart from the previous efforts of its
principals.  I see no cause for concern about adoption.

-Rob