Re: Quick question about spec

[Paul Warren <pdw ferret lmh ox ac uk>]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2000, Julian Adams wrote:

> Hi all - as a lurker on the list I've follow the development of the spec
> from day one, and the initial thought of *yes this is the start of things
> hanging together on the desktop* has stayed with me the whole time. It seems
> the current draft is accepted by everyone. 

Pretty much, yes.  There were a handful of things that need to be tidied
up on the current version, but I haven't had time to write them up, and
nobody else has been keen to do it.  

There was also the suggestion that the write-up of the draft needed a
reorganisation to be more readble / understandable.

I should have some time after Tuesday.  I will take a stab at doing the
first bit - fixing the final details, but I really don't have the time or
motivation to rewrite entirely as I think the intended audience is
sufficiently specialised and technical to understand it in its current
form.

So, I'll polish it off, and we'll call it The Final Draft at the end of
this week, and we can start to get it implemented. Any objections?

> In the future it could cover more, but there's a solid base and it
> would be great to get it ratified and announced. Just that leap would
> make this a major success. Can any window manager maintainer want to
> maintain multiple sets of hints rather than one ?

Yes.  I don't think that it is a flop.  The current spec fixes a lot that
was wrong that in the original Gnome spec, it adds a lot of new possible
features, and it potentially standardises between at least KDE and Gnome.

There have been some long pauses in its development, but I think that this
was inevitable (a) without a dedicated spec "maintainer" (b) with a very
losely defined goal, and thus nothing to measure our progress against,
(c) with a large number of interested parties, all with different
approaches.

Paul