Re: [STUMP] Contrib

[Wojciech Meyer]

Ben Spencer <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi list,
>
> I'm starting to wonder what the point of the contrib dir in stumpwm
> actually is.  What is the advantage to having this stuff bundled
> alongside stumpwm?

What's the point of M-x tetris game in Emacs distribution? ;)

Well, these days I can see your point, bloating distribution probably
less useful these days world where we can pull the contrib from
anywhere.

What would be useful however would be an easy way of dealing with
packages (possible dependencies) and installing them. Probably
centralised AFDS would be fine, if it can somewhat be painless.

>
> There are some possible perceived benefits that don't stand up to
> scrutiny:
>
>  * Stuff in contrib is kept in sync with the main progam.  Blatantly
>    untrue: nobody tests everything in contrib when making changes to
>    stumpwm.

Not possible, with current development model of StumpWM, some of the
patches have been waiting for more than one month, and there are too few
people active with commit access to fix these problems. Some of the
folks requested commit access to fix things. I see that pushing simple
things takes time, so how can we remain coherent with contrib? ;)

>
>  * Being in the main repo makes users aware of the contrib software's
>    existence.  Debatable: this stuff is not mentioned in the stumpwm
>    manual so I suspect most users find out about stuff that might be
>    useful to them on IRC or the web.
>

Maybe having two lines of StumpWM, one a git repository with people
having a commit access deal with contrib, and then push changes
(including bare StumpWM), and then some maintainer integrating these
changes when they are properly tested. However, it can turn to be a
regular StumpWM development, but that's the only way I see for time
being, if we want to keep contrib as it is.

> What if instead we had a database of stumpwm add-ons that were hosted
> elsewhere?  This could be something as simple as a wiki page or a
> full-blown system with reviews, comments etc if anybody cared to make
> it.

I think it's a good idea.

>
> The authors of the add-ons could maintain their software in their own
> repos (including non-git repos if they have some strange aversion to
> git), and users could keep it up to date from there.  The packages
> could use asdf to make it convenient to load them from stumpwmrc.

ASDF part then needs working, because I can't see to be a nice solution
to install contributed packages to Stump.

>
> There's some stuff that should probably remain in the main repo:
> stumpish and stumpwm-mode, stuff that is useful to distributors, utils
> for use on the stumpwm source, and example RCs.  But anything that is
> strictly an add-on could be hosted elsewhere.

I tend to agree with it.

>
> Thoughts?
>
> Ben
>

Wojciech