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Sun to drop Sawfish in favor of Metacity

Submitted by stro on Tue, 2002-05-21 11:15. Sun Microsystems

As many of you know, Sun recently hired Wipro to help out with GNOME 2.0 development. Many of the wipro hackers had jumped in to help with sawfish porting. These hackers will now be focusing on Metacity.

Glynn Foster writes:
As most of you probably all know by now, Sun has decided to drop Sawfish
in favour of Metacity for its release of GNOME 2 later this year.

This decision has been based on issues such as accessibility,
maintainability of the code [1], documentation, multi-head support and a
general eagerness from the community to commit to Metacity in the
future. We feel it is in Sun's best interest to go with Metacity.

With that being said, Sun will make every effort to get whatever work
that has been done on Sawfish back into the community, mostly probably
through bugzilla.gnome.org, so that it can be picked up by others if
desired.

This mail is more of a FYI that Sawfish development will cease within
Sun, specifically by our partners Wipro and will be transferred to
Metacity. We hope this decision will not have a detrimental effect on
the community release in a couple of weeks time.

Re: Sun to drop Sawfish in favor of Metacity

Submitted by FF on Wed, 2002-05-22 10:04.

Because it is a waste of

- programming effort

- system resources

- complicates things

Just imagine there are up to 4 different lisp interpreters loaded + bindings for gtk, gnome etc. Who is paying my system upgrade and who the hell is maintaining all the stuff and keeping it up to date. On the other hand probably none of the 4 is complete with respect to the common lisp specification and thus misses crucial bits for being a real programming alternative.

If you want to write some lisp script for sawfish or whatever you have to read lots of unneccessary manuals and get used to the new dialect. Thats actually what kept me from hacking some sawfish scripts.

You see, it actually doesn't work that well. You can manage some windows but you could do it before quite well. Don't get me wrong. I use sawfish and I'd chose it over any WM today, but it just doesn't seem to be the perfect solution.

btw, I remember an item in the sawfish FAQ where john said he didn't chose scheme because he didn't want to learn it and had already written its own lisp interpreter.

So there is actually nothing in rep which makes it more suitable for sawfish or whatever.

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