Re: Project Permafrost -- A Restoration Attempt

On Sun, 14 Nov 2010 02:09:43 -0800 (PST)
mulenmar <[email protected]> wrote:

> I've been working on something for a while now, and those of you who monitor the #icewm IRC channel on Freenode have heard about it already.
> 
> It's something I've titled "Project Permafrost", as an excuse to make an ice-related pun. :P It's intended to address the few weaknesses IceWM has, such as the following:
> 
> * The documentation is misorganized and incomplete, with empty sections in the manual, information on making themes scattered haphazardly between the IceWM manual and an even more atrocious Theming How-to, and incorrect info at several points. (Sorry, just the facts.)
> 
> * IceWM is on its third theme hosting site now, and each time a new one has been chosen is because the old one disappeared or deleted all the themes. The current site makes no effort whatsoever to make sure the themes don't violate trademark law, making it basically host to "illegal software." :roll: 
> 
> * Many themes have been almost entirely lost, and most of them that I recovered before they went completely extinct have unclear licenses and/or trademark violations. They can't be fixed without their author's permission, since they're technically copyrighted works by default in my country.
> 
> But what IceWM is lacking the most, IMO, is an organized and *active* community core. The closest thing to a centralized community I've found is in the Puppy Linux forums, where it appears all the themes created are specific to their distro. Otherwise, I've seen plenty of IceWM fans scattered throughout the forums of various GNU/Linux distributions -- Ubuntu and Arch, for example -- but no obvious thought to contribute back to the software project. :(
> 
> That's where Project Permafrost and its forum come in. With a central community more searchable and personal (not in a privacy-intrusive way, don't worry) than a mailing list, perhaps people will be more inclined to collaborate on new, updated documentation, or to create themes that are attractive yet lightweight enough to be used with old machines and be included in the upstream repo :D. 
> 
> We have a window manager that has transparency support and fewer dependencies, yet is simple to configure and use -- we can and should show this off, and bring IceWM to the forefront of Freedesktop software!
> 
> Come register and look around -- there isn't much to the forum yet, and it's Sourceforge-hosted (no custom themes, apparently), but it's a start. :D 
> 
> 
>       
> 
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This sounds like a smashing idea as I too have found it difficult to locate themes and good docs for icewm. Most of the themes I have found were from box-look.org, I used to get them from freshmeat but they recently decided to drop just about all of them for some unknown reason. I think the thing that is needed most to get people to contribute themes back is a clear doc explaining how to make a good current theme. 
I myself have considered looking at the code and trying to address some of the things that are on the todo list but my limited understanding of C++ makes it difficult to give anything back that is usefull. 

-- 
treah blade <[email protected]>

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Centralized Desktop Delivery: Dell and VMware Reference Architecture
Simplifying enterprise desktop deployment and management using
Dell EqualLogic storage and VMware View: A highly scalable, end-to-end
client virtualization framework. Read more!
http://p.sf.net/sfu/dell-eql-dev2dev