ratpoison, patches, and the future

Happy new year (almost)!

TL;DR - I've created an additional public git repository
<https://github.com/JeffAbrahamson/ratpoison/> for ratpoison with my
patches merged in. (Git is, after all, intended to be multi-homed.) I don't
want this to turn into a project fork, but if there's no discussion, that
could accidentally happen. This email starts that discussion.

With more text:

I've submitted a number of patches to ratpoison on this list. Most of them
haven't made their way into the main source tree, and not because of
discussion suggesting they shouldn't. This bothers me on a couple levels. I
want to use my own patches. I also want the warm feeling of public credit
that comes from seeing my name show up in invocations of "git log". And I'd
like to note my contributions to ratpoison on my CV without a reader of my
CV thinking I'm lying for lack of mention in the log or the AUTHORS file.

I've pinged Jérémie about this privately, but the conversation didn't
start. I assume he's busy rather than ignoring me, and this email is in no
way an expression of animosity. So, since I don't have commit privileges to
the official repository, I've begun committing to mine. This shouldn't be a
problem, git was designed to be multi-homed and to facilitate pulling
patches and merging between repositories. I realized recently that I'd
slowed down on my contributions to ratpoison because I was concerned that
patches would become increasingly difficult to apply if they were all left
in a pile for a later date. I'm also concerned that if these become my
private patches, I will in essence be running my own private window
manager, which is not my goal.

This concern is not entirely theoretical. On the ratpoison wiki, we list a
number of patches. Those that have not been applied to the main source tree
are sometimes no longer present (links to hosts no longer available) or
don't merge cleanly. A patch without a user community behind it is dead
code. (This also suggests that the wiki could do with some love.)

The patches I've written are a "git remote add ...; git merge ..." away
from being a part of the main tree. I'm open to reasoned discussion that
they shouldn't be in the main tree, but not so much to silence.

What I'd like is either to have commit privileges to the main repository or
else to have a much more reactive process for applying patches (with "git
am" so that contributors get credit in the log).

In the absence of that, I will nonetheless continue to develop and
contribute patches, both to this list and directly to my repository. My
rough development list is this:

1. Frame affinity (an option). When I close a window, only windows that
have some reasonable call to display in that frame should appear. Don't
just display the most recently unmapped window.

2. Workspace improvements.

3. Tests. We don't have any, enough said.

4. Performance measurement. We have this ultra-lightweight window manager,
we should be able to claim that it's fast and lightweight. But we have no
measurements, we have no benchmarks, and this saddens me.

5. Xrandr. When I plug an external display into my laptop, I have to
restart ratpoison to detect the external screen. This is a limitation of
xinerama, which has largely been replaced in the outside world by xrandr.
We should support xrandr.

I want to repeat again that I very much don't want this to become a project
fork. We aren't big enough for that (and even if we were, it would seem
dumb). The Debian popcon graph
<https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=ratpoison> for ratpoison suggests
384 installs (not users). By contrast, I3
<https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=i3-wm> has 1608, xmonad
<https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xmonad> 1687, notion
<https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=notion> 116, and cinnamon
<https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=cinnamon> 1267.

Your thoughts?

Jeff Abrahamson
+33 6 24 40 01 57
+44 7920 594 255    <-- only if I'm in the UK

http://jeff.purple.com/
http://blog.purple.com/jeff/

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