Re: the gnustep wreckage. Part 1: windowmaker and user apps

[Enrico Sersale]

On 2004-11-19 15:42:02 +0200 Riccardo <multix@ngi.it> wrote:

> Hello, enrico,.
>
> Quick reply :)
>
> On Friday, November 19, 2004, at 12:05 PM, Enrico Sersale wrote:
>
> > On 2004-11-19 11:50:40 +0200 Riccardo <multix@ngi.it> wrote:
> >
> > > <snip>
> > > GWorkspace is so buggy I hope that at some point Enrico wills top adding 
> > > features, stabilize what it is, make configure work to disable ddb and 
> > > make it build cleanly.
> > > <snip>
> >
> > Which kind of problems are you encountering, exactly? Besides the ddbd part 
> > - that must be considered only "work in progress" - the rest of the app 
> > should be very stable (I mean the current CVS).
>
> apart from ddb which I had to disable by commenting out code? :)
>
> The problems are related to moving the files to teh trash and Operations.
>
> The first attempt (I never run gworkspace on this box before) it complained 
> that .Trash didn't exist. I needed to create manually the "Desktop" directory 
> and .Trash was created. Intermediate directories in the path were not 
> created. This may be a problem of gworkspace and how you handle this or maybe 
> of the function call you use! I don't know. Once done this I experience that 
> the Operations helper "freezes" or stops working when I give it to move 
> stuff. It can lock up so much that it has a white menu (not refreshed, only 
> the boundary box) and the icon in the dock becomes grey. Often manually 
> killing and repeating the operation works... SO it is not easily repeatable..
>
> Also I would prefer that at the closure of gworkspace all helpers were closed 
> at the quitting of gworkspace (well, I would be happy if you would remove 
> some of those helpers totally...)

I want to reply to this point because it seems that many people don't like the 
actual solution.

There are (and there will be) two main applications, GWorkspace and Desktop.

In the future, Desktop will be integrated in the window manager and this means 
that it will use X stuff directly, not allowing anymore any kind of unification 
with GW.

Last week I've made some experiments with WindowMaker and I've got it to work 
as a GNUstep application (the X events are intercepted by the run loop of the 
app and then passed to the Window Maker function); after this I've tried to add 
to WMaker.app part of the sources of Desktop and I've got the Desktop window 
and the Dock (my dock) on all the WindowMaker workspaces. So, I think that this 
is the right way to go (using WindowManager or something else).

In this perspective, the existence of all the helper apps is easy 
understandable:

both the apps needs file operations.
both the apps needs an Inspector.
both the apps needs a Finder and will use its File Annotations and Live Search 
Folders.
both the apps use fswatcher, thumbnailer, etc...


> for the rest as I told in IRC today I was pretty pleased by the total 
> appearance of the desktop. This is the first time I have a fully working and 
> 2d accelerated X on NetBSD with my Matrox card and once a few apps are 
> launched and wmaker is set OK.. I can feel at home almost :)
>
> So even if I complain about nasty bugs I take the moment to thank all who 
> worked up to this point! I only think we should do a feature freeze and try 
> to take out to stability what we have here now. And release it to the world.
>
> -R
>
>
>
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