Hi, it seems that fvwm2 has been dropped from upcoming versions of Red Hat Linux. This is at least questionable decision, considering that fvwm2 is widely used and it runs well with older hardware (where GNOME or KDE would be just torture). Yet fvwm2 is very configurable (comparing to e.g., mwm/twm). Also, querying RH Bugzilla, fvwm2 has produced only a handful of bug reports during the time bugzilla has been in use. Any hopes to see fvwm2 back in RHL? It's almost the only choise for us with older hardware!
Please use "fvwm" for the package name this time (like fvwm-2.4.8).
Yes, I'd like to see fvwm2 retained too. If it isn't I'd need to install it myself after installing the OS, which is just one more thing to do.
Please get fvwm back!
It seems that we're close to next RH Linux release and yet nobody from RH has dared to comment this outrageous decision. Is it really the case that RH wants to be almost the only *nix-like OS which does ship with an fvwm2 package?
I would also like to see fvwm2 included in new Red Hat releases. It is small, doesn't have an enormous amount of features, and runs very well on a laptop with only 64M. twm is *not* an option.
I'd like to second these complaints. The lack of fvwm2 is very high our list of reasons why we will not upgrade soon to Red Hat 8.0. Please bring it back, it is a small, extremely popular, efficient, and highly reliable window manager. Even Linus once noted that it is his favourite window manager. Droping it comes close to blasphemy ...
Assigning to the desktop people.
Havoc Pennington wrote: > We are generally trying to reduce package count and focus on the core > packages that run by default. We want to improve the robustness and > bug response time on the core, and that means doing less work in other > areas. Nothing against fvwm2. In principle a good idea, if the selection of these core packages is well made and doesn't exclude important classics. It is just that very many old-fashioned, experienced, and even slightly conservative Linux users (and that includes a vast number of system administrators and similar decision makers in organizations) - consider fvwm2 to be *the* standard core bread & butter window manager, a direct descendant of the classic twm - will see no need to move to one of the enormously resource hungry MS-Windows or CDE clones (KDE, GNOME) - have made and got very used to significant customizations to their personal working environments in ~/.fvwm2rc, many of which are not possible with more modern window managers Us Linux old-timers would be greatly appreciated if you could add fvwm2 back to the supported core packages, otherwise we'd have to waste a lot of time recompiling it ourselves, because we are definitely not going to move to KDE.
The same argument you're making there can unfortunately be made about pretty much every package we ship or have shipped or that someone else has shipped. The cost of each package is more than you think, especially when there are potentially security errata. An errata costs us substantial resources. A "contrib" or "unsupported" area for packages might help, but we don't have that right now. I might personally have booted Sawfish and kept fvwm2 instead, though the downside of that is that fvwm2's support for Extended Window Manager Hints is limited IIRC. For low-end boxes we do expect GNOME to continue to shrink (GNOME 2 is smaller than 1.4 already), and Metacity and Sawfish would both work fine standalone if someone wrote a (trivial to write) pager module for them using libwnck. So those would both be ways to support low end boxes that involved less special-purpose code. But in any case, we have already passed the package list freeze for the upcoming release.
When was there last an erratum issued for fvwm? I can't find an update to fvwm for Red Hat 6.2, 7.0, 7.1 or 7.2. Obviously there can't be one for 8.0 :-( But today I see a fix for a buffer overflow in Window Maker. There are way too many window managers in Red Hat. I don't use Window Maker, Enlightenment, Sawfish, Metacity or any of the other GNOME window-managers-of-the-week. But I've used fvwm for many years on both Solaris and Linux. I'm disappointed that Red Hat should have dropped it just because they've filled up the distribution with an assortment of momentarily fashionable window managers.
Havoc: EWMH support is pretty complete and configurable in 2.5.0+ versions. Search for EWMH in http://fvwm.org/generated/manpages/fvwm.html
Red Hat 9 still lacks fvwm, one of the most stable, popular, and well-maintained lightweight window managers on this planet. Very sad ... 1 June 2003 is fvwm's tenth birthday! http://www.fvwm.org/birthday/ Fvwm development is active, and support is excellent.
See http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2004-May/msg00054.html I think we should not put fvwm2 in Core, but definitely put it in Extras; once Fedora is properly set up and running, that distinction should not impact the quality or ease of install of the fvwm2 package. Someone could go ahead and package it for Extras today of course (probably someone already has, even)