Hi, I have been using fvwm for a while and I think that this idea of changing the config format is ill thought out and silly. Why does this need changing now after all these years? I can't see how you expect a script to convert to this new format easily - its a very lofty goal.
Don't do this at all - go and do features or something people want. Why do you always try and make these sweeping changes? Ethan On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 1:25 PM, Thomas Adam <tho...@fvwm.org> wrote: > On Mon, 19 Sep 2016 at 12:57 Ron Tapia <rd...@psu.edu> wrote: >> What are the >> shortcomings of the current configuration format that the new format >> addresses? > > Have another read of that document, Ron. FVWM is completely governed > by how it reads in commands, and hence at the moment, each command is > responsible for parsing its values. There's been twenty years of this > idea; organically growing out of control. Adding or even changing > existing options to commands is a nightmare; there's no state being > kept between commands (which would be good), and hence there's a lot > of the same sorts of information being gathered separately, leading to > a lot of duplication at the code-level. > > Changing the format is a great way of getting a clean break, and being > able to rationalise the commands we have now, and need; moving > functionality into other commands in an extensible way, which will > also reduce the code complexity somewhat. You can't easily do this > with the format we have now. Dominik and I have given this a lot of > thought[0] and to my mind, trying to keep with what we have is a lot > of work, more so than changing it. > > None of this precludes what we have now in terms of preprocessing, and > having other things produce a configuration file in a format FVWM can > read in. Indeed, there will be conversion scripts to handle the > transition. > > So this is coming, albeit slowly, and right now what there is are just > my ideas with the beginnings of an implementation to see what that > looks like. > > People are welcome to comment on functionality, etc., with other suggestions. > > For the rest of you saying: "It's been that way for the last X years" > need to wake up and realise that I will be making little changes as > time goes on. FVWM has laid stagnant for a long time, and it's about > time someone stepped up to the plate and helped to modernise/improve > things a little. It's boring work, it's certainly not feature > development, but if this work isn't started now, or thought about, you > won't see much more happening with FVWM since all of these > organically-grown problems need solving first. That's why we're in > the situation we are now---no one has wanted to do it, and what we > have is one big mess. > > So wake up, people. A change is on the horizon. It won't happen > overnight, but it does need to happen. > > -- Thomas Adam > > [0] https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm/blob/master/docs/PARSING.md >
