Re: gnome-pager in gnome-applets CVS...

[Mike Bond <mike bond template com>]

First off, I'd like to say my original message was just meant as a
request to leave options for users. That said, I quite understand what
using bleeding edge is all about, been a professional developer myself
for over 15 years now. Bugs are not a complaint, if I find them, I often
try to track them down and squash them or provide some input on what is
causing them if I don't have time, which seems to be the case all too
often these days ;-)

As for features I would like to see, I think it has been mentioned
several times that it would be nice if the icon would change to indicate
the iconic state of a window. I realize that, at least with the current
CVS, brackets are put around the name.

Which leads me to my next issue, tasklist is using a black foreground
for the text color even though every other applet I run, and most other
gnome apps for that matter, are using a white foreground in my
configuration. Not sure why this is, but given the theme I use, it is
nearly as bad as black on black. My suggestion here is either use the
foreground that everything else appears to be using, I believe based on
the "default" style fg[NORMAL], or allow for the foreground to be
separately configured.

Also, as I don't make it a habit of moving my applets around much once
I've placed them, I think the handle, or whatever you wish to call it,
is not necessary and it takes up space. It would be nice at least to be
able to turn it off. For that matter, on a slightly different subject,
the issue of being able to hide the task button in deskguide has been
brought up before and would be a nice thing to be able to do.

Aside from the foreground color, I think these issues have been raised
before, that is why I did not cite them in the original message. There
may well be other things that I'm not thinking of at the moment, and
some I haven't found yet, as my experience with tasklist and deskguide
at the moment have been to start them up, look for the things that I
believe are missing, and when I find they are not there, go back to
gnome-pager as I know it works.

Which reminds me, Havoc, you say there are outstanding bugs, any ideas
what some might be? I've not had problems with gnome-pager in quite a
long time. I realize the code is not real clean, and gives a lot of
warnings, but it runs rather well. If gnome-pager continues to have no
maintainer then yes, it's lifecycle is quickly going to come to a close
with all the changes happening, and I must agree, given the fact that
deskguide/tasklist have active maintainers it does seem a bit redundant
to maintain gnome-pager, so long as there is the potential for them to
cover everything that gnome-pager is capable of. I will see if I can at
least fix any major outstanding bugs in gnome-pager though I doubt
seriously if I will have time to update it to using the new
architecture, given that I would first have to take the time to learn
the new architecture, but I will take a look.

Anders Carlsson wrote:
> 
> OK, as the author of tasklist I'd _really_ like to know why you dislike
> tasklist? Just saying that it's bad doesn't do much good. Saying _why_
> it's bad, what features you like, what features you don't like would
> help me a lot.
> 
> You should also keep in mind that 1.1 is an UNSTABLE version with
> UNTESTED code. All features aren't implemented yet, but we're working on
> it.
> 
> You also complain about the memory issues. First of all we plan to
> replace the existing WM interaction code with gwmh which both desk-guide
> and tasklist uses. That'll allow for the code to be shared. We also plan
> to make the desk-guide and the tasklist a multi-applet and that'll
> reduce memory usage even more. However, this won't be done until
> tasklist and desk-guide are fully debugged.
> 
> If you don't like living on the bleeding edge you're free to use October
> GNOME with gnome-pager.
> 
> //andersca
> andersca@gnu.org

-- 
TTFN
MikeB

Application development is a race between software engineers who
try to create fool proof programs and the universe which is trying to
develop superior fools.
	
	So far, the universe is winning.
	Let's not give it any help...