On 21 November 2010 21:42, Dieter Plaetinck <die...@plaetinck.be> wrote: > On Sun, 21 Nov 2010 19:56:07 +0000 > Connor Lane Smith <c...@lubutu.com> wrote: > >> On 21 November 2010 19:33, <sta...@cs.tu-berlin.de> wrote: >> > Another kinda heretic idea might be to have fairly feature-rich >> > branches and feature-removing patches. Just thinking loud.... >> >> Trunk, a branch per patch, a spicy branch, and a plain branch? (Names >> pending.) >> >> Trunk would be mainline dmenu, a stable version to be packaged. The >> spicy would have every patch merged, I guess for people who just can't >> be bothered to mess around merging patches. And the plain would have >> only the essence of what makes dmenu dmenu, for people who want the >> simplest and smallest version. Read: no flags, no Xinerama. >> >> I'm thinking out loud too. :p >> >> cls >> > > I think we should just try it. We can easily create new branches > to create new versions, and we'll see soon what works and what doesn't. > With the right choice of branches we can come up with a situation that > is relatively easy to maintain, yet flexible and robust enough.
I think we should stop creating unwanted complexity. As for all suckless software our goal is to create software that works for everyone without having tons of configure options and features to choose from. For those exceptional cases where people use something like dmenu in a modified way the wiki-patch based approach which has evolved is perfectly fine imho and enough boundary to discourage going the route of highly patched dmenu/dwm/etc versions. I don't mind if you set up a git repo where each patch from the website resides in a separate branch, but I think you just organise the existing approach just differently. You don't fix the problem, which is having a suitable process to determine the best feature set for the software by default. So far the patch based approach was good enough to count the downloads and to decide on popularity or necessity of some patches to be applied to the mainstream repo at some point. And everyone can easily add a patch file to the wiki, apart from having a central place for the patch files. Cheers, Anselm
