Thomas Adam writes:
> On Thu, Jun 02, 2016 at 03:07:27PM -0400, Dan Espen wrote:
>> In the case of FvwmForm and the Setup Form, I think you've eliminated
>> something that I remember at least one poster using. It's not the
>> best part of Fvwm, but the Setup Form gets a certain class of users
>> from befuddled to a working start. It's not a big deal for me
>> but I don't see that removing it gains anything. I don't agree
>> that it was outdated.
>
> It is outdated for two reasons alone:
>
> 1. The syntax alone is arcane by FVWM's standards. For instance:
>
> Next [*] ...
>
> versus:
>
> Next (...)
Simple enough to fix.
> 2. The list of applications (via menus or Style lines) are from the arc, and
> no longer reflect the de facto set of programs typically installed along
> with most distributions. The only outliers I can think of here might be a
> few of the major BSDs.
Well, "*lock" was meant to handle all known clock programs.
Still works for me.
XTerm/rxvt still works for me too, but "*term" might be a good addition.
I use xmag as opposed to all the other magnifiers.
But when I put those apps in there, all anyone could expect
is that they were the apps I was familiar with. More could be added,
but I suspect EWMH hints covers some of those bases now.
> Both the above tell me that FVWM has rested on its laurels for far too long.
> Those people who do decide to use the mechanism of what the Setup forms
> provide, clearly can't be relying on much. So what do they gain by using
> these configs? Maybe it's the FvwmButtons configuration? I can't say, but
> I'd guess that over anything else.
What they gain, and what it was meant for, is new users curious about
Fvwm. Without a config, the casual user will get no where
and most likely look somewhere else.
The WM came up and you couldn't even create a window.
Previous to the Setup Form, we would tell a new user to
copy/rename the provided sample to get going.
With your changes, we don't even provide a sample.
>> I have no idea what the distros do. I started as a SunOS user
>> and a sense of loyalty makes me want to continue to serve those
>> users.
>
> That's rather cute, but SunOS died a long time ago, especially since Solaris
> pretty much took over that market even by the time I poked around such
> machines. I just can't justify supporting that kind of idea any more.
Solaris is SunOS (5).
But I admit I've been using Fvwm from even before the Solaris branding.
>> Since you are primary developer, feel free to ignore me on this.
>> As I said, not a big deal to me.
>
> That's humbling that you'd see me as such, but I am by no means ignoring you,
> rather I'm trying to open your eyes to what most of the other players are
> doing, and hence how the applications that typically came with
> SunOS/Solaris/BSD are in the minority, as are the number of users of those
> systems/applications as well.
>
> It always comes back down to what's realistically maintainable, and what
> *should* be maintainable by those developers who choose to work on FVWM. Part
> of that is about setting expectations on the remit of FVWM as a window
> manager, and the environment it is typically deployed in. For that, we have
> to look towards the common set of Linux distributions, more than anything else
> [0].
Agree.
> This entire set of work did indeed start with deprecating modules, and that's
> fine. What this has proven to me (with your helpful guidance) is that we can
> go further in the efforts I've started, because of certain modules being
> deprecated. As far as the internal configuration goes, and having FVWM
> provide its own set of values to the user in the case where they have no
> config, should be a clean slate for those people(s) who wish to work on such a
> thing. This is what I see as a good provision, and although that might be
> seen as heavy-handed, the impact in the long-term will be beneficial.
>
> So given all of that, I'm inclined to proceed---but I am not personally
> interested in providing a new configuration myself, but I am willing to offer
> mentoring and help to people who want to work on this, as I have a better idea
> on how to do that which isn't as invasive as it has been in the past in terms
> of spreading out over multiple files. Should anyone want to chat about this,
> I'm all ears.
Not clear what you mean here.
Are the multiple files the sample and the Form in the modules directory
or
do you mean the potentially multiple files created by the setup form?
Pretty easy to fix the later.
> Dan, does this help explain things? If it does, I'm keen to move this forward
> sooner rather than later.
Allow me to kibbutz as you go.
> [0] I'm an OpenBSD user myself.
Fedora here.
I can see something called "AnotherLevelUp":
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~jtl/ALU/
but I don't see it in the repositories.
I get:
[root@home ~]# dnf provides */.fvwm2rc
Error: No Matches found
So, there is still a question in my m
