Re: gnome-wm

[Sven Luther <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr>]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 02:12:07AM +0100, Christian Marillat wrote:
> Sven Luther <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr> writes:
> 
> > On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 10:09:12PM +0100, Christian Marillat wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > The gnome metapackage is broken ? If yes you should file a bug report.
> 
> > Christian, do you believe that after having done an upgrade from gnome 1
> > to gnome 2 and having changed _no_ configuration file, having twm as
> > default windows manager is a sane default ? Especially if you were using
> > sawfish before ?
> 
> As we said here before you should use the x-window-manger
> update-alternative to select your window manager. This *work* in
> gnome-session 2.0.8-4

Sure, i do this, now that i know about it.

The problem is that for joe random user, who has just upgraded his box
and is following unstable, and thus upgraded from gnome1 to gnome2, he
will know nothing about that, and will get twm as windows manager, and
wonder what happened to him. And come complaining here, as colin noted.

A solution to this would be to tell him to use update-alternative,
either in the README.Debian (which may already be done), or better yet
in a debconf question.

Especially since he was used to be able to change the windows manager in
the control center, and this is not possible anymore.

And remember, the new Gnome True Way says that instead of adding
preferences, it should be done right, not that you have to force the
user to use some horrible kuldge to make things work, and remember,
since gnome2 is targeted to 'real users', well i guess your grandmother
or corporate users, resorting to a arcane invocation like setting a
environment variable or using update-alternative, is just an horrible
kludge.

> > What was being discussed in this thread is that people should but an
> > environment variable in order to set a windows manager for a user, while
> > the problem is mostly that people complain (see the first post in this
> > thread) about having twm as _default_ windows manager, not as the wm
> > they did choose.
> 
> > So, should i fill a bug for this reason ?
> 
> I think you don't understand. If the environment variable WINDOW_MANAGER
> is set to an window manager *this* window manager is used instead of
> x-window-manager.

Yes, sure, the problem is that it should be the responsability of the
package to do this, not the user, which had a perfectly working gnome1
setup.

Anyway, i think the right solution is already taken in another part of
this thread, so why are we arguing ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther