[634] in athena10
Re: set skip_foo; window managers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Tue Dec 2 14:31:21 2008
Message-Id: <ACDEC213-34DC-4DE6-A1E5-18F0E43568BD@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <DD4D3906-A327-4204-A767-E09443FD313E@mit.edu>
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Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 14:31:05 -0500
There's also skip_dash and skip_xlogout. I can't remember what we
decided about Dash - are we completely de-supporting it? If so, we
should probably make some outreach to current Dash users. I will
attempt to crawl AFS and get a list of people who
have .athena_dash_interface files.
Unless someone already did this and has such a list.
-Jon
On Dec 2, 2008, at 2:02 PM, Jonathan Reed wrote:
> 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
>
>
