On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 01:40:33PM +0100, Michael Treibton wrote: > On 18 August 2014 12:44, Thomas Adam <tho...@fvwm.org> wrote: > > Is this perhaps not clear enough? I appreciate the enthusiasm, but this > > groundwork is really important before we can move forward. Unless there's > > anyone else who wishes to help out with this---which would mean > > understanding a fair amount of fvwm internals at this point, etc., I am not > > sure what else to suggest you can do for now. > > I'm interested in mvwm specifically as i've already tried to port your > patches to fvwm already without success.
I didn't look at your efforts because I already knew they wouldn't sit pretty ontop of fvwm as it is at the moment. > i'm worried this is turning into an 'exclusive club' at the moment. I'm sorry to hear you say that, but this simply isn't the case, and I'm not sure how you can really claim that. I'll explain in a bit more detail below for you. But I am starting to run out of ways of explaining the same thing to you; either I'm not being clear, or you're after a differnet answer, but I assure you my answer will always be the same at the moment: sit-tight and watch tnis space. > some questions - > > what's the contribution path to 'outsiders' like me? At the moment, Dominik and I are working on documenting how fvwm parses its commands, and also how modules parse their commands. This is a complex thing to document. Until we can see the big picture, it's not advisable to look at anything else just yet, because we might miss something. Also, it helps us identify common parts as well. It's the only way we can improve this area, and it's a very important one. But an "exclusive club"? No. This part of improving fvwm needs people like Dominik onboard to really help explain the nuances and intricacies of how the parser currently works, and where its known limitations are. It's possible to infer some of this from the code, but not always. Have a look at the parsing document Dominik has written [0] and you'll see the level of detail we're talking about. The nature of this clean-up work isn't behind closed doors; far from it. But it does take people familiar with the code to really get in there and start looking at what it's doing. If you feel left out because of that, I'm sorry to say that isn't our fault, or your fault, you just can't necessarily help with this point. > the roadmap (in the TODO) lists quite boring features - is this all > theres going to be? Which features do you consider boring? Most of those items are from myself, identifying areas in fvwm I'm not happy with. Again, it's very easy to add new features, but this isn't the point of cleaning up fvwm, it's about improving its internal state, improving on the existing code, and hopefully removing some of it as we go. It's easier to add features after the foundations are a little more structured, than it is to remove things after the fact. And that's partly why fvwm is in the state it's in. It's a *damn* good window manager, but like any software project of some 25 years, there's a few dark corners that just need some light shining on them. That's what the TODO file [1] is for. If you don't like that, feel free to use fvwm, as you won't notice anything different. > have you (and others) got enough experience with fvwm to carry this Do I have the expertese? I've not worked on fvwm for as long as Dominik, or Mikhael, or Dan, and the others who you'll see [2], but I do know a lot about window management and fvwm, so why wouldn't I be useful to this project? > off? - or do you need others to help? Having others help would be good, after we're over this initial set of parsing documentation, etc., and have worked out what to do next. This isn't happening behind closed doors, and you're clearly following us on this list, so keep doing that by all means. I do hope I've been able to answer your questions as thoroughly as you wanted. But I would ask that you don't peddle this too much, you're detracting me away from actual work at the moment. :) HTH, -- Thomas Adam [0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ThomasAdam/mvwm/document-parsing/rewrite-notes/parsing [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ThomasAdam/mvwm/master/TODO [2] http://fvwm.org/authors/
