Re: icewm releases

On 09/25/13 00:08, Frank wrote:
>      The downside to all this....is that probably sooner rather than
> later some distros
> are going to drop IceWm from their support...probably as soon as some larger
> problem presents itself.  I have watched as other non-maintained
> software gets
> pushed to the wayside. Unfortunate, but a fact of life.
>
> Cheers
>

(I added icewm-devel)


This is what I fear as well. Icewm may be feature complete (as some 
people claim), but with no maintainer it is sooner or later going to 
break properly. There is something called ongoing maintenance. For this 
reason, I posted this on Slashdot a a week or so ago:

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/09/14/1815250/ask-slashdot-attracting-developers-to-abandonware


As a Gentoo user, I get to appreciate the work of Pacho Ramos and 
Agostino Sarubba. They have picked up a lot of patches recently and 
added them to portage (Gentoo's compilation of package recipes).
http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/x11-wm/icewm/ChangeLog?view=markup


There are also a lot of suggested patches in
https://sourceforge.net/p/icewm/patches/

I make no claim about either quality or validity of any of these 
patches. But someone made an effort to create and upload them. I suspect 
some of them may carry some value.

Having a stable release with (some of) these patches upstream makes 
icewm available to distributions with less active package maintainers, 
and also makes the 'product' icewm appear and behave identical across 
multiple distributions.


As for the claims about 'feature complete', I'll attribute these claims 
to lack of imagination. I enjoy how icewm stays out of the way as much 
as any icewm user. I am sure there are more ways icewm can stay out of 
the way, and be beautiful whenever I call for it!  See:
https://sourceforge.net/p/icewm/feature-requests/


Marko appears to have other priorities than maintaining icewm, and I do 
not blame him. It is free software after all, and the only ones owing 
anyone anything are the users towards Marko, Mathias and the others. I 
appreciate what I got for free already. I hope someone competent and 
with sufficient time, bandwidth and *interest* will pick up the mantle. 
Not only for my own, selfish reasons, but also because I want more 
people to realize the absurdity of todays 'Desktop Environments' and 
whatnot.

There was a lot of off-topic crap in the slashdot thread linked to 
above, but some had useful suggestions. Like revamping the website and 
issuing a new release with accumulated patches and perhaps a new, shiny 
theme. Anyone up for it? There is a lot of low-hanging fruit. So much, 
in fact, that it may require some effort.  :-)



Dag B



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October Webinars: Code for Performance
Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance.
Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from 
the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register >
http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60133471&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk