Bug#677935: Bug#505924: cwm
On 16 Sep 2012, at 14:18, Nicholas Bamber <nicholas@periapt.co.uk> wrote:
Hi Nicholas,
Thanks for your comments!
> So here are some stupid questions for starters:
> 1,) I'm running LXDE and openbox and I know nothing about X11. How do I
> get cwm working? Could I have that in a README.Debian file please?
It should simply be a case of selecting 'cwm' from your X login manager or adding it to your .xsession if you use one. The environment with cwm is very simple; it doesn't display anything by default, so you'll just get a blank screen. You can press eg Ctrl-Alt-Enter to spawn a terminal.
The keybindings, behaviour and config are thoroughly documented in the man pages. I could put in a README.Debian referring the user to those, but I didn't think that was enough information to merit an extra file.
> 2.) Why doesn't the package have a "Provides: x-window-manager" clause
> like openbox does?
Good point, it should have! I will add this.
> 3.) What steps have you taken to check that cwm will fit into the Debian
> environment? Have you looked at say
> http://wiki.debian.org/WindowManager? Compared with openbox?
I did set it up to be selectable as a window manager from KDM/GDM, but it should also be possible to set up as an x-window-manager via alternatives. I'll figure out how to do that and make sure it works.
> Then there are issues I picked up on myself but found reiterated in the
> existing bug report:
>
> 4.) "I would remove the last sentence of the first
> paragraph though (about the code that used to come from 9wm), as it
> doesn't seem very relevant anymore."
> More generally I feel your long description should answer the following
> questions: What is cwm?; Why might I want to use cwm? Why might I not
> want want to use cwm?
>
> I think you're almost there but as it stands the bits about .cwmrc and
> virtual desktops seem out of place. You may want that information in
> there but I would suggest thinking about it again.
The object was to try to give people an overview of where this window manager comes from and the sort of experience it gives with some of the text taken from the upstream description. It could possibly do with some tidying.
> 5.) "And if you don't use a VCS for your packaging, you should remove
> those commented-out lines."
> Have you considered using collab-maint as a repository?
> http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/PackagingProject?highlight=%28CategoryAlioth%29
I don't think I can use that without being a Debian developer/maintainer. I am considering moving the packaging into a git repository, possibly tracking from upstream, but I haven't had the time to experiment with this. The changes are very small at present, so they are quite easy to maintain without.
> 6.) "There is no upstream changelog as there is none
> provided." "The README doesn't contain useful information for end-users,
> so you shouldn't install it."
> Actually the README contains the upstream changelog. So you should
> install the README as the upstream changelog. [More strategically you
> could ask upstream to generate a report from the Openbsd repository to
> get an upstream changelog. Or you could do that yourself perhaps.]
Good ideas, thanks.
> For completeness I'll also reiterate the comments from Benoit Knecht:
> 7.) In debian/control, the debhelper version dependency should simply be
> ">= 9" instead of ">= 9.0.0".
Will fix.
>
> 8.) And in the same file, the long description contains a few
> double-spaces.
Text from upstream! I'll fix that too.
> 9.) "But prehaps you should consider Depending on xserver-xorg (or at
> least Recommend it, if that makes more sense). You could also Suggest
> xinit, as it seems like a nice way to start such a minimalistic window
> manager." [7 & 8 seem sensible to me. I cannot comment on this one.]
Recommendation might make sense, but not dependency as it's possible to run a window manager on one host for an X server on a remote host. I will look at what some other simple window managers do.
I will make some changes as soon as I can! It might take a few days though, as I'm rather busy at the moment.
Cheers,
James
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