Re: Reasons for a GStep windowmanager

[Dan Pascu]

On  7 Jan, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:
> Sorry, but I think you missed the point here. At least *I* was never bitching 
> at WM (or its dev team). If it is my poor English language which causes some 
> confusion, then I apologise.
> 
> On the other hand, I do not see why you WM developers get so 'upset' when
> we are talking about another, possible replacement for WM in the context 

nobody is getting upset among wm developers about replacing wmaker with
another window manager if you feel this way. what triggered my reply was
the reasoning put behind this discussion. Things like "wmaker doesn't
provide this, doesn't provide that, doesn't allow me to switch off dock
at runtime, ..." when in fact it does provide all of the things I saw
put as reasons for a bad interaction and the need of a new window
manager. Maybe not in a perfect way and I also know that there are
things that are completely missing at the moment, but hey, its not at
the final version.
Nobody came in and said "this feature in wmaker is not working as it
should, let's improve it". The tone was: "its doesn't have this, that
and that. trash it and make another".

And if you want us to code something, we need clear specifications,
because if you only have an idea but don't know exactly how it should
work, how are we supposed to know? And you know, we even accept help =)
If someone knows what he wants and how to do it is free to code it and
send a patch.

You think is moving to slowly? Sorry, but we all have full time jobs.
We're no longer students.

> of GS, if you are focused on 99% non-GS anyway? I mean, if WM provides 

we're not focused on anything except fixing bugs and going towards a
1.0 version. That's our only current goal. I don't know where this idea
came from that we're focused on 99% non-gnustep. what does this mean?
that we are clearly focused on making it as much incompatible with
gnustep as we can? This is silly. I only said that at this moment
wmaker is used 99% outside of any gnustep environment (this means that
except a few people on the gnustep mailing list, most of its users run
pure X and never heard of gnustep). And this is a true fact, no matter
how much it hurts feelings. Making a gnustep-only window manager means
a window manager that none uses at this point. You have no right to ask
us to drop all the things our current users use right now, just to give
more time on things that some uncertain users may use at some uncertain
time in the future.
I think it was clear from the beginning that we are fully supporting
gnustep, I doubt anyone among wmaker developers felt the other way at
any point. But instead of coming to us with clear specifications or
asking to improve some existing but not well working things by giving
exact hints, I see people jump in the "let's drop it and make a new one"
wagon, without even verifying that the reasons they give for this are
really as they claim.

> most of the required features, why then not just say 'hello, it's there, 
> use it'?

But nobody asked. All I saw was people that already seemed to know the
reversal and used it as a reason to make their argument.

All I know is that wmaker is there and already have pretty much support
for gnustep while all other window managers have 0% gnustep support. I
also know that wmaker developers are willing to add all the support
required for gnustep as they stated many times. Still I see there are
people there that don't like wmaker at all (else they would have tried
to fix it instead of dropping it), and would be much more happier with
reinventing the wheel. I personally see no problem with that if they
feel this way. Maybe the gnustep project have enough developers to
afford to throw up our offer and go only on their own resources.

P.S. what I find highly hilarious is that I saw people accusing us of
the fact we use our own written toolkit - WINGs - in wmaker instead of
going with the gnustep libs, while, they adopt the exact same policy
they criticize: they insist on the gnustep/objc only and accept nothing
that comes from outside, even if they need to rewrite everything.

-- 
Dan