GNUstep & The Window Manager Problem

[Alex Perez]

Folks,

Correct anything I say in here which is parently untrue, please. 
InterfaceWM development has been nonexistant for the last five months, and 
I honestly don't think that Ian Mondragon is planning on continuing to 
work on this project. He might intend to, but obviously Real Life(tm) is 
getting in the way.

Meanwhile, WindowMaker has had almost zero foreward movement for the last 
several months as well. Up until extremely recently, their public CVS 
wouldn't even compile, and it had been like that for MANY MANY months as 
well. It seems that checkouts are now compiling as they should, and the 
Wmaker folks are now using xft2 for anti-aliasing, but there's really not 
much progress being made.

So my question is this...can anyone who is using GNUstep with *other* 
window managers sort of check in here and let us all know how they seem to 
work with GNUstep? Is anyone here interested in a hostile takeover of the 
InterfaceWM project? I know that Chris Vetter was working on it a little 
bit once upon a time, but don't think there's been any work by him on it 
recently either.

The list of window managers which work properly with GNUstep is so short 
that I can count them on one hand and still pick my nose at the same time. 
This is not a good state of affairs, and maybe we could be a bit more 
proactive in terms of helping out window manager developers who are 
receptive to the idea of getting GNUstep working with their window 
managers properly. What do others think about this problem? Personally, 
I've been using GNUstep for a couple of years now as a *user* and am not 
really very happy with windowmaker, but my options are so limited, and in 
my opinion, there's really just a big problem with entrenchment WRT window 
managers. It's the classic "good enough" syndrome.

I know that Alexander Malmberg had done some work on getting GNUstep 
windows to self-decorate themselves, but don't know what the current 
status of that is or if it would be suitable to use it in a 
GNUstep-compatible window manager.

Maybe the issue is that we just need to grow our developer community. 
Would anyone be interested in developing a plan of action for recruitment 
of disaffected GNOME/KDE/other developers who are unhappy with the current 
discussions within the GNOME community about which direction to take GNOME 
in, and then acting on that plan while those who are disaffected are "ripe 
for the picking," so to speak? I would be very interested in helping out 
in this areana.

Anyways, does anyone else here have any comments. My apologies if any of 
you have found this e-mail incongruous.

Respectfully,
Alex Perez