[Herts] XMCE 0.1 released (semi-shameless plug)

[David Honour]

First off I apologise for hijacking the thread, I had assumed the threading 
was done by subject, but, apparently not. I also use a threaded mail reader 
so I suffer from this as much as anyone.

There is some documentation in the ~/.xconfigure/documentation directory, 
although I will admit it is rather limited.

The installer was the first thing to get written and, whilst it has changed 
slightly there is further to go before it is any good. It is supposed to 
search a home dir and find the 3 .tar.gz files then unpack them to their 
respective directories, this does seem to cause a lot of issues so it would 
be nice to think that this would be changed for 0.2. The whole program plus 
some odd bits like some new language tools are in the SVN, however the 
installer hasn't been changed. If you look at langselect as an example you 
will see how much my BASH programming has come along since then (mainly due 
to 'Learning the Bash shell').

As for that message, I totally agree, and would like to add:
if [`whoami` = 'root' ]; then
	echo 'XMCE should be run as user'
	exit;
fi
To both the installer and the startxmce script. (The installer already detects 
the existence of ~/.xconfigure. (quick note, all the files are tab indented, 
so, any changes to the svn should reflect this for the sake of consistency.

The packaging system and installation procedure is a mess and I fully 
recognise that.

Like I say the installer was written the back end of last year and is 
hopeless, if you wanna dive in and have a go at fixing it i'll give you a dev 
account for it, if not, it will be waiting until the language stuff is done.

I know that you're being constructive, you actually looked at it!
Thanks, all feedback is appreciated:
David

On Wednesday 23 May 2007 21:56:41 David Precious wrote:
> <wibble>
> Please don't hijack threads... when you start to discuss a new topic,
> please create a new message rather than replying to a previous message;
> for those of us with threaded mail readers it's quite irritating ;)
> </wibble>
>
> David Honour wrote:
> > For those of you who haven't heard me going on about this, XMCE is my
> > open source programming project. An xorg.conf editor. It is in the early
> > dev days, but, if you're even a tiny bit curious then look for it on
> > sourceforge.
>
> Cool, sounds like an interesting idea.
>
> (To save others looking: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmce/ )
>
> Seems to be lacking in documentation at the moment (understandable as
> the first version has only just been released :)).
>
> I downloaded and untarred coreforxmce.tar.gz, and ran ./startmce.sh,
> which gave:
>
> [davidp at columbia:/dev/shm]$ ./startxmce.sh
> ./startxmce.sh: line 15: .xconfigure/module detection.sh: No such file
> or directory
> ./startxmce.sh: line 23: .xconfigure/xserver settings linker.py: No such
> file or directory
>
> It should probably have a check at the start, something like
>
> if [ !-d ~/.xconfigure ]; then
>      echo "XMCE not installed yet!"
>      echo "Please follow the install instructions."
>      exit;
> fi
>
>
>
> BTW can I make a suggestion?  For the next release, I'd suggest naming
> the tarballs with a version number in, something like
> xmce-core-0.2.tar.gz or similar.  Also, I'd really recommend tarring up
> a directory, so that when you extract the file, you end up with a new
> directory, say xmce-core-0.2/, rather than having all the files dumped
> into your current directory.
>
> I'm not clear on why installer.sh creates a .urhome symlink to the
> user's home directory either?
>
> I would recommend having the installer.sh (and probably the docs too)
> inside one distribution tarball, so you download the tarball, untar it,
> and run ./install.sh, which deals with installing stuff to the
> appropriate places.  It could also do with some error checking too, so
> it doesn't barf out a few screenfuls of errors (beause the tarballs
> aren't in my homedir) followed by cheerfully proclaiming "installation
> complete!"  :)
>
>
> BTW please don't take any of this as an attack, it's meant as
> constructive criticism/advice.  I fully support anyone who makes the
> effort to develop an open source project to give back to the community -
> kudos to you!
>
> Cheers
>
> Dave P
> http://blog.preshweb.co.uk/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Herts mailing list
> Herts at mailman.lug.org.uk
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/herts