Re: RFC: config file transition for WMs

["Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@debian.org>]

Hi,

 nasty subject you picked...

 >  - create a wizard script which converts the relevant entries in
 >    personal menu file and the recommendation to use it in NEWS.Debian
 >    and README.Debian (Contra: not transparent, users must RTF READMEs)
 >  - hack the program code to make the changes or ignore old syntax and
 >    use the replacement arguments. (Pros: transparent, Contra: hardcoded
 >    arguments, may override intentional settings)
 >  - shell wrapper around icewm and icewm-gnome to fix the menu file. User
 >    can create some key file in ~/.icewm to tell this wrapper not to
 >    change anything

 The second option is the ideal one from _our_ point of view.  The
 program just keeps working, now and in five years time.  Upstream might
 have good reasons not to like this (they usually do ;-).

 I guess you don't like the last option because it's slow.  Well, what's
 slow about starting a shell script, stat'ing a couple of files and
 exec'ing the real program?  Not much I'd say.

 The first one is error-prone as you say.  Your option is to tell the
 system administrator to do this.  Let the patching script run once on
 each user's files.  Interesting things might happen if the user is
 currently running IceWM.

 Whatever you do, plan for the future, this is going to happen again.
 And make the thing idempotent, someone's bound to run it multiple
 times.

-- 
Marcelo