This is supposed to depend on the gconf key
/desktop/gnome/apps/window_manager, right?

If I set this manually to use metacity, or any other window manager,
then the next time I log in sawfish still gets used.

This is with garnome 0.8.0.

Updating all cc bugs that have the GNOME2 keyword set to the GNOME2.0 milestone,
to help jrb triage/prioritize cc bugs. Filter on 'luis doing GNOME2 work' to
ignore this spam.

Any idea what the situation is on this, jody? This is pretty
borderline on being 2.0.0 stuff here :/

http://beauty.stanford.edu/Mockups/window-properties.png
Seth is coming to our rescue this weekend :)

But I don't think it should be in 2.0.0. I think the world won't end
if we ship without this functionality, and I'd like to get it better
tested before throwing it out to the world.

Well, I'd like to see it in pre-2.0.0, at least... if we're shipping
with two wms for the purpose of testing them then we should make it as
easy as possible to test them, with (perhaps) an explicit 'this
capplet will not be in 2.0.0' message.

seth, are the settings going to work for sawfish?

i can probably help with getting them working there if you want.

i'd rather use this that put it in the default apps if i can help it.

Yes, settings will work with Sawfish too. All that's going to happen
technically is .desktop files for Window Managers can specify a
library that handles settings. Its just a tiny little GObject
interface that they provide their own implementation of. I plan to
include versions for Sawfish & Metacity (though perhaps Metacity would
prefer to include the code in its own codebase when this is done).

I should mention that the basic WM switching functionality of the
capplet already works. I just need to find time to finish some of the
settings stuff and integrate it into gnome-settings-daemon.

ok.

i can definitely spend time on the sawfish part.

i don't know how you want to do the dependencies:

either gnomecc has to depend on librep (lame), sawfish has to depend
on control center, or it can run rep commands directly :/

default apps is not where this is going to go.

Dropping the priority a bit. This would be nice to have but not as
huge as my first instinct said it was, really.

punted until later.  Seth seems to have a nice start, but it's not
going to work for 2.0.0, and it's not as important.

One recommendation. I think the window manager font should be set in
the font capplet, not in the window manager capplet. That way all
fonts, system, desktop, window border and probably monospace will be
set in the same capplet.

Now that CC 2.0.0 is out, maybe it is time to add this to the default
build?

Yes, that is the plan.

I'm not seeing this anywhere... what's the situation?

The situation is that I have a patch that fixes this (also adds window
title to the font preferences, and window manager themes to the themes
preferences), and Stephen may too, but we haven't been terribly
successful in negotiating who fixes the problem better.

The disagreement basically stems from whether simpler and controlled
is better (Seth) or whether exposing full functionality is better
(Stephen). Stephen's solution has each window manager essentially
implement these dialogues for itself and provides the hypothetical
feature of allowing a different dialogue to appear that is implemented
for that specific window manager and shows its feature set (I don't
think he has implemented this since he mostly cares about Metacity, as
do I). I personally would prefer to have GNOME managing the interface
to window preferences rather than WM authors (who could provide their
own tool if they really need 40 million crack preferences), since WM
authors have historically demonstrated themselves to not be masters of
usability. This small set of preferences is then exposed as GConf keys
and the settings daemon, and implemented by a small backend specific
to each WM (and used as the appropriate WM is selected). This code is
done though I have only written a backend for Metacity so far (less
than a hundred lines of code).

Wearing my usability hat, I decided early on that it was better to
have a small set of preferences exposed by this interface that is
consistent between all WMs with the notion of making the window
manager a transparent implementation detail. This would theoretically
also allow vendors to change WM from Sawfish to Metacity for GNOME 2.2
(a need that has been lessened since it sounds like most vendors will
ship Metacity as the default right off the bat anyway).

Wearing my programmer hat, if we decide to support Metacity and
Metacity alone as the Official GNOME Window Manager and other WMs can
go to hell, we shouldn't bother with any plugability at all, and my
solution is serious overkill that will only introduce more code to
maintain etc.

If we decide to make choosing WMs a possibility in GNOME we should do
it right, which I think my solution does.

(Actually, I would prefer doing the former and throw my code away
though I suspect it would enrage a fair number of people)

Yes, it will enrage me even more than I already am enraged with Gnome2
on some many levels.

I have never seen Stephen's version so I have no opinion on it, I like
Seth's however judging by the screenshots. I also think it is a bad
idea to no allow choosing windowmanager that I personally would be
very unhappy with. 

If we can get this in and at least support metacity and sawfish we
will also provide a nice upgrade path for our users who will not have
their windowmanager choice autoswitched but rather can go to this
capplet and switch to Metacity if they so want. I hope jacobs offer of
coding the Sawfish support still stands.

One more thing :), to quickly and easily solve the issue of which
patch to integrate I suggest we use the time honored method for doing
this, namely letting the maintainer of the control-center, jody, choose.  

I should express that I personally think "choosing window manager" is
crack. I would appreciate it if we could avoid a chorus of "yeah,
removing wm selection would piss me off" in this bug, because I think
both Stephen & I are agreed on this point. I wish we had planned to go
Metacity-only (officially, of course any WM would basically work, just
wouldn't be supported) 6 mo. ago. I pushed for Metacity at the time,
but it was premature. My personal feeling is that we are in some way
committed now to at least supporting Metacity & Sawfish, and if we
choose to go with Metacity-only in, say, GNOME 2.2 we need to make
that very clear and public.

the sawfish offer is no longer valid as sawfish got axed from the sun
work.

Talked to Stephen on IRC. And to take what he said on face value he
had  no objections to Seth's chooser coding going in.

My .02 is that can we PLEASE get the dialog for configuring the window
manager features in CVS, so I can lose the one from Metacity; 
but having GUI for choosing which window manager is running is just a
big old "break my desktop" button.
If you change window managers you get totally different defaults for 
what mouse buttons do, among other things. This should be in the
PowerTweak control panel not in the main control panels.

Given that changing window managers just makes things _stop working_
from the standpoint of a user who doesn't know what a WM is, I don't
think we have any business putting this in the main control panel.
Right now the term "window manager" is _nowhere_ in the GUI, and
that's all good.

Again, if we want a PowerTweak control panel for technical users,
that's fine.

Well to outdo Havoc's .02 with my own 0.4. Judging by the positive
response in the user community to jh latest work (see reponses to
gnomedesktop.org to the latest summary story as example), I think we
do have a large contigent of people who the simple 'just works' wm
don't cut it for. GNOME has historically catered very well to the
desktop tweakers and I think having an integrated wm chooser done in
the fashion of Seth's prototype would be a good way to keep that still
important segment of our users happy. And since they easily can switch
back to metacity I am having trouble seeing how this would bork their
desktops.

Also suggesting that stuff should go to the PowerTweak package until
such a package is more than conceptware is just another way to 
say that it should not be at all. 

Since I will not be the one coding this I guess my vote is small, but
I don't want it to be that the person who eventually do code this item
skip functionality for wm choosing since 'that is what the community
wanted'

Havoc, something is already in CVS as the "Windows" capplet, as well
as modifications to all the other wm related capplets (titlebar theme,
titlebar font, etc). I haven't looked at it for a couple months now,
but it seems to still be working OK. It should work for any WM that
installs a fairly simple configuration library; and one already exists
for Metacity.

This functionality is in CVS, so closing this bug. (reopen if you want
to vote "Andrew is a doofus")

The functionality has disappeared from CVS, so reopening this bug.
It's been one of those days.

-> enh

Controversial bug; this may be WONTFIX for usability reasons. Havoc
hates it, I know that :-)

Closing. It has been said several times in mailing lists that this is 
not going to happen in core GNOME and must written into an unofficial 
extra tweak tool.