Re: gnome compliant window managers

[Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow alum MIT EDU>]

Jan Gentsch <gentsch@ifm.uni-hamburg.de> writes:

> SuSE rpms don't depend on a particular windowmanager, but you are
> prompted the first time you startup to choose one of the windowmanagers
> available on the system (that assumes that at least on is installed, but
> that assumption will hold true 99.9% of the time unless the person
> operating the system nows what he is doing anyhow.

I'd consider that better behavior than what Red Hat does. This could
be made to work even better by having a gnome-compliant-wm
pseudo-package and having gnome-core depend on it, and all
gnome-compliant WM's provide it.

However, I think it would be better to just probe the gnome-compliant
window managers in some arbitrary/specified order the first time gnome
starts up, and depend ona gnome-compliant-wm pseudo-package. Indeed,
one might argue the pseudo-package is not even necessry since users
should be able to run with a non-compliant wm oo if they want to, but
that is a separate issue. Perhaps a "windowmanager" pseudo-package
could be used instead, depending on distributor tastes. The reason I'd
suggest this instead is because a "choose your window manager" dialog
would confuse the heck out of new users.

I see now that this has already been suggested in the
"Windowmanager in session.wm" thread; I wasn't aware of that thread
until now because I didn't subscribe to gnome-list until I saw the
cross-posted message that started this thread.

Further discussion should probably take place on the other thread.

 - Maciej Stachowiak