xfwm4

[Robby Workman]

Diego Jacobi wrote:
>     If I understand you correctly, then you would like the xfce project as
>     a whole to move ahead, and that's why you're interested in the
>     features of the stock components, like xfwm4. That's a nice intention,
>     but as I wrote above, xfce needs advocacy maybe, and mainly people
>     that can contribute code, not discussions about features or being
>     lightweight or not :-).
> 
> 
> :)
> The big problem here is that no one wil contribute in a project where 
> there are no goals or todo list. There isnt any written philosophy of 
> design in a webpage.
> And that would lead to somebody write an unaceptable app. or patch.
> If someone wants to add the minimizing effect, he will not know if 
> another developer is already working on it, or if it will be acepted on 
> the main stream. 


Unfortunately, I've not contributed any code to Xfce, but I have done
*many* patches for another project.  That project also didn't have
any of the things that you're saying Xfce needs, but I saw some things
that (in my opinion) needed to be implemented/fixed/whatever, and
rather than making a bunch of noise on their mailing list, I started
coding.  The first couple of patches didn't go in, but after some
discussion with the developers about what was wrong with them, I fixed
them and applied the same rationale to future ones.  I've had probably
twenty or so since then, some small and some large, and I'd like to
think that the project is better off today than it was when I started.
What I'm trying to say is this:
Everybody wants to talk, but very few people actually *do* something.
If you want to make a difference in things, you *have* to be one of
the latter group of people.

As one who is actively involved in development of a distribution, I 
can say without reservation that patches that attempt to implement
ideas, even if they're not very good overall, are often better than
*only* ideas - sometimes that little bit of effort shown by a user is 
enough to get my "give a damn" in gear and handle the implementation
myself if need be.  I won't claim that the same thing applies to the 
Xfce developers, but I'd guess that it's at least partially true.

-RW