Re: GNUstep & The Window Manager Problem

[Nicolas Roard]

Le 24 mai 04, à 22:55, Alex Perez a écrit :

> 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.

Yep, RealLife sucks.

(snip)
> 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.

Wouldn't it be simpler for a first move to correct what you find 
annoying in wmaker ?
or list the different bugs / missing things... We could then give that 
to the wmaker guys,
or if there is no more wmaker guys left, do it.

> 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.

I don't know about the self-decorate windows state with the current 
cvs. A few weeks
ago it worked with Alex's patch. It's quite nice to have GNUstep libs 
in control of the
window's rendering (for theming, but also for proxy icons for instance).
The problem though is that you can't move a frozen window -- as the 
GNUstep app
manage itself. So a bug is more annoying than usual. With wmaker it's 
not _that_ annoying
because you could always move a frozen window using keys, but well... 
and that's the same
thing with modal panels -- you can't move the background windows of the 
app.

A better solution perhaps would  be to have the window manager uses the 
GNUstep code
 to decorate the window. If I remember, Yen ju started a wm using -gui 
?..

> Maybe the issue is that we just need to grow our developer community.

obviously..

> 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.

I agree that it could be an interesting strategy. Wouldn't hurt anyway.

Cheers,

--
Nicolas Roard