Hello all, For those of you who follow fvwm-workers@ may already know some of this, but for those of you who don't, it's worth mentioning what the state of fvwm development holds for the future.
We have been discussing a lot about how we're able to make changes to fvwm without breaking it for everyone. As many will know doubt know, fvwm is well-over twenty years old and in some cases it shows, too! Trying to bring fvwm up to date with newer technologies, and to even make small improvements has a very high barrier to entry, especially when trying to maintain backwards compatibility. Over the years, we've had a loyal number of users who have come to rely on a lot of nuances and behaviour which we don't necessarily want to take away. To that end, the latest stable release (2.6.7) marks the end of the line for fvwm2. This release is unique because it was my opportunity to remove all of the modules which I thought were no longer providing anything useful (because the functionality no longer exists outside of fvwm in certain applications, or because more widely-used modules in fvwm provided equivalent/better funtionality). Indeed, this releases also includes a new default configuration. I hope you find it useful. But I suppose it's fair to say that 2.6.7 won't necessarily appeal to some of the dyed-in-the-wool types for whom changes is too much, and/or cannot live with that really old module which works Just Fine (tm) as it is. Well, that's OK as well, since we also have everything as it was before on the 'fvwm2-stable' branch. So if you want to use things like FvwmTaskBar, for example, that's the release you should use. This branch may, occasionally, receive bug-fixes over time, but certainly nothing else. In fact, I'm not envisaging any further work happening on fvwm2.X at all. So what does this mean for fvwm? In order for us to continue to make larger changes, we need to be able to break backwards compatibility and to make a lot of structural changes. All of this goes towards a lot of other changes we'd like to make. This therefore means that we will look at fvwm3 to do this. This will be different to fvwm2. We're in the process of setting up fvwm3, and there'll be additional announcements when this is complete. For a reference on the releases, see the following: https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm#releases Any questions, do please ask. Kindly, Thomas Adam
