Paul Harris wrote:
>     PS: My repo contains all the fixes for bugs which were posted to
>     the list that I know of. That is the Window Maker I am using
>     right now, so I care deeply about having those bugs fixed.
> 
> I understand the need for your own repo and I commend your dedication to
> our one true love, Window Maker.

Heh :-)

> Can we please also seem some efforts made in the way of ensuring these
> changes are pushed into the main windowmaker repo, so we don't risk a
> fork?  

Believe me, I feel a bit bad about having my own repo and posting the
link to it in this mailing list. And I will not do it anymore if
that bothers people, because the patches there do not apply anymore
to the mercurial repo.

But I don't think our current status quo is OK, the latency to apply
patches which fix bugs is too high, IMO. Never mind applying patches
which address compiler warnings (some of them can be real issues)
or simply "cleanups", which try to make to code easier to maintain.

I think that this week I gave up sending those things to the list,
not because I wanted to be different or not play by the rules, but
simply because I felt it was not working.

A few weeks ago I sent an email to Jonh (Cc:ed now) about Samir's bug
fix for the "82nd workspace crash", and got no reply. That is not to
criticize him, because he may be very busy with work etc and it was
_he_ who pointed out the bug in the first place!:-)

But I got the impression that "hey, perhaps I should not waste
more time trying to have the patch applied" if I can simply apply
it to my git repo and push it to repo.or.cz and use it happily
afterwards (I even have 100 workspaces for fun now :-)

Window Maker does not need to have a lot of code churn because it is
99,99% _perfect_ as it stands _now_. That also means that this code
we have right now will be with us for a long time, and I think it
is important to make it simpler.

So if there are patches like "Remove useless tests" (like checking
if(!dock) if it is impossible to be otherwise etc) -- like some of
Daniel's patches in his webpage -- are almost a "must have".

Because in the end it makes life a bit easier for new people trying to
read the code (like me). And when new people read the code, there
is always the chance that they will spot bugs or suggest further
cleanups to make the code easier to understand etc. And one
thing lead to the other (like Nicolas' patch which motivated me
to look at the code and improve the situation). That is a win-win
situation, IMHO.

Motivation is the key to success, if people are not motivated
to do things, nothing will happen.

> Are you pulling patches from the main repo too, as you go?   So
> at least one of the repos has all of other other's changes...

My repo contains the mercurial one, except for the new
feature of having history for the dialog boxes. But it contains more bug
fixes, and the "Escape handling in switchpanel" thing too, which I started
to use it and can no longer be without it because it increased my
productivity a tiny bit :-)

> I'm not sure what the best way of doing that would be, or whether it is
> even the right time to do it.  I just want to make an appeal for unity,
> in the future :)

My repo was "outdated" for a long time, because I was trying to keep
it in sync with the official one.
[ the difference would be only Rodney's 'inotify' patch and my
  "--disable-verbose-compile" option to the configure script,
  because Dan Pascu did not like in the past. ]

But as I kept reading the code and compiling it with -Wall -Wextra
-Wshadow (this one is important!) using the --disable-verbose-compile
option -- which makes the warnings stand out clearly -- I saw the
need to clean up and try to simplify things a little bit.
But the obvious place to send those patches (wmaker-dev) was not
motivating me because I don't see a "dev" mercurial branch with
low latency to merge things. So sending the patches or not sending
them seem the same to me.

So I simply make the patches and send them to my own git repo. They are
out there and people can see them, and judge if they are worth having
by themselves. As long as people realize that my repo is not official,
I don't think I am hurting them by having those things there.

In this particular case of the "escape handling" patch, things
clashed because I got interested in the patch and saw opportunity
to simplify the code (look at src/cycling.c at the git repo and
make your own judgment), and the obvious low latency place to
put them was in my repo. People can send patches against it if they
feel like helping me, like Nicolas (thanks, btw!).

I hope people will notice that I am being careful and trying to
to a good job, and that the true Window Maker philosophy is being
preserved.

Regards,
Carlos



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