On Mon, 19 Sep 2016 at 12:57 Ron Tapia <rd...@psu.edu> wrote: > What are the > shortcomings of the current configuration format that the new format > addresses?
Have another read of that document, Ron. FVWM is completely governed by how it reads in commands, and hence at the moment, each command is responsible for parsing its values. There's been twenty years of this idea; organically growing out of control. Adding or even changing existing options to commands is a nightmare; there's no state being kept between commands (which would be good), and hence there's a lot of the same sorts of information being gathered separately, leading to a lot of duplication at the code-level. Changing the format is a great way of getting a clean break, and being able to rationalise the commands we have now, and need; moving functionality into other commands in an extensible way, which will also reduce the code complexity somewhat. You can't easily do this with the format we have now. Dominik and I have given this a lot of thought[0] and to my mind, trying to keep with what we have is a lot of work, more so than changing it. None of this precludes what we have now in terms of preprocessing, and having other things produce a configuration file in a format FVWM can read in. Indeed, there will be conversion scripts to handle the transition. So this is coming, albeit slowly, and right now what there is are just my ideas with the beginnings of an implementation to see what that looks like. People are welcome to comment on functionality, etc., with other suggestions. For the rest of you saying: "It's been that way for the last X years" need to wake up and realise that I will be making little changes as time goes on. FVWM has laid stagnant for a long time, and it's about time someone stepped up to the plate and helped to modernise/improve things a little. It's boring work, it's certainly not feature development, but if this work isn't started now, or thought about, you won't see much more happening with FVWM since all of these organically-grown problems need solving first. That's why we're in the situation we are now---no one has wanted to do it, and what we have is one big mess. So wake up, people. A change is on the horizon. It won't happen overnight, but it does need to happen. -- Thomas Adam [0] https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm/blob/master/docs/PARSING.md
