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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.

This is probably a good thing...

Submitted by flarg on Thu, 2002-05-23 11:09.

This is probably a good thing. As a whole, Gnome on Solaris is pretty slow compared to it's Linux counterpart.

I have two workstations: One Sun Ultra5/270Mhz/512Mb/Solaris8 with a Celeron366/512Mb/RH7.2; both with the latest Ximian Gnome. I don't run Nautilus on Sun, I do run Nautilus plus a dozen other fancy apps on the Intel machine. The Intel machine is really darn fast; whereas on the Sun machine, I often have to wait 10 seconds for a window to draw, and I see Sawfish sucking up more then it's fair share of resources.

Sawfish is nice, but I know of several bugs (in the Bugtracker) which have been outstanding for a year, so it seems that development is really slow or has stopped. Rumors are that the lead developer left for Apple.

After a few WM improvements, and a few Gnome-terminal speedups, Gnome on Solaris will be very usable.

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