[629] in athena10
set skip_foo; window managers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Tue Dec 2 14:07:22 2008
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From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: athena10@mit.edu
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Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 14:02:16 -0500
Bill and I were discussing the various "set skip_foo" things we tell
people to set, and what we should do with them in Athena 10. I see
two possible approaches. The first, a slash-and-burn method, is to
desupport all of them, and say "If skipping this one feature is
important to you, then go write your own .xsession".
The second approach would be the following:
Desupport:
skip_capplets: does this even work anymore?
skip_quotawarn: Quota is sufficiently large these days that I don't
think we care
skip_lert: There are plenty of ways to tell lert to be quiet, why do
we need to support this?
skip_athneteventd: Will we even be using this in Athena 10?
Support:
skip_xss
skip_tty_startup
skip_x_startup
Unsure:
skip_authwatch: Do people use this?
skip_initial_xterm: Is this really a big deal?
skip_nautilus: This is the big one. The primary reason, IIRC, for
having this was that nautilus failed miserably with window managers
that were not Sawfish/Metacity. It still does. However, nautilus
will be more useful under Athena 10, now that things like flash drives
and CDs will "just work". So arguably, I say we punt it, and if you
want to run a window manager that doesn't play nice with nautilus, you
get to figure it out on your own.
That also brings us to the question of how we want to deal with window
managers. Neither twm nor mwm are installed by default under Athena
10, and they're not in the windowmangers locker because they were
always in the release. Should we install twm and motif-clients for
debathena-workstation and debathena-cluster? Or, should we desupport
the WINDOW_MANAGER variable entirely, and people who want a custom
window manager get to run their own xsession?
Thoughts?
-Jon
