Re: [Sawfish] lack of contributors

I think you will get a lot more contributors if you provide a better guide on setting up sawfish on gnome and kde.... this is where your new users will be coming from.... for a newbie changing window managers is very confusing and can be scary.... having to leave the comfort of gnome meant that not only did I have to learn sawfish but I had to learn to set up networking and other things first.... i almost gave up on sawfish because my wifi just worked on gnome. it is still running flakey xfce..... maybe a good guide to setting up a few essential things missing from sawfish would help (like the networking).... one of the contributors of awesome told me he only stuck with awesome because the ones he tried before it he couldn't get to work straight away.... also more guides and screencasts will get people interested, and excited cos sawfish has a lot to offer.

On Apr 4, 2012 6:33 PM, "Christopher Roy Bratusek" <nano@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wednesday 04 April 2012 23:35:21 Campbell Barton wrote:

> Greetz

>

> I work as a blender dev and have been involved in encouraging more

> devs to get involved with our project (with some success? :) ).

>

> heres my 2c.

>

> *** Make building as EASY AS POSSIBLE ***

>

> I might not put this first, except that previously I had a lot of

> trouble building sawfish, and not just on once off - different PC's,

> distros, before the project revived too.

> Probably half of the troubles I have are that I like to install

> sawfish to a custom prefix /opt/sawfish for eg. This means I have to

> point to a custom librep, librep/gtk etc... which i couldn't always

> get working.

>

> Recently I tried building with Aur on arch and had a very strange

> error running `make install`. where I had to delete a file after make

> started but before it finished else it would complain the file was

> already existing and quit. - Not sure if this is Aur-pkg's error or

> sawfish.

>

>

> While I cant tell you how to run things, it would be really nice if

> there was some way to checkout librep/rep-gtk/sawfish at once and

> build all at once.

>

> Possibly this could be done with git-submodules?

> http://book.git-scm.com/5_submodules.html

> The root dir could have some shell script to build all (so this is

> 10min work, not a large restructure).

>

> As an example - heres a shell script to download/build and install

> llvm/clang -

> http://wiki.blender..org/index.php/User:Ideasman42/BlenderClang#Installing_L

> LVM_.26_Clang_from_svn_.28tested_on_linux.29_inst_llvm..sh

>

> Correct me if Im wrong but last I tried, sawfish was more trouble to

> install then this (if a window manager is harder to build then a C/C++

> compiler.... somethings wrong?)

> also note that I've built openbox, fluxbox, icewm, notion,

> windowmaker, jwm - and sawfish is by far the most complicated to get

> built and running.

>

> (on a side note I used to build my own kernel. gcc.. glibc xorg, Im

> familier with building different software and found sawfish quite

> difficult to build)

>

>

> --- take this with a grain of salt, perhaps I missed something here or

> just had a lot of bad luck

I've spend lots of time improving the build-stuff. It's way better than the original stuff Sawfish had earlier. For installing into a different prefix all you need to to additionally do is:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/op/sawfish/lib/pkgconfig"

Or whereever you installed Sawfish.

Personally I'm not a fan of all-in-one repos. You can still checkout all 5 separately and use a script in the toplevel-dir to to stuff.

> For me. not being able to do this....

>

> git pull ****; ./configure --prefix=/opt/sawfish; make install

>

> ... is a big stumbling block for getting involved with the source ---

> (or svn/hg/bzr, - scons/cmake etc equivalents)

Basically no project that uses autotools lets you do that. All require autogen.sh in first place, but well, if one is bored he could port Sawfish to CMake ...

Debian is the most tested distribution to build Sawfish on. It works just perfect here. According to Teika and Fuchur Gentoo is fine, too. Kim has provided improved spec-files to aid building on Fedora.

On those distros a simple configure/make/install triplette is enough in the outermost cases. If you ran into issues ... you may report them to us.

Other distributions are somewhat untested/less tested. Since we are provided with patches for OpenBSD as soon as something is broken, it should be fine, too. FreeBSD and NetBSD also provide it in their ports.

Regards