On Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 09:03:34PM +0100, Andy Arbon wrote: > Hello, > > I was having a discussion with a mate about our respective choices of > window manager and it occurred to me that I know very little about where > FVWM came from.. > > Who started it? When? What was it based on? I'd find info on this sort > of thing quite interesting if anyone knows anything about it.
((Chuck, are you still lurking? Can you fill in the gaps before 1998?)) Robert Nation started it back in 1993. The first time anything was heard about it in public was on the 1st of July in 1993, when Rob bundled a development version (0.5.something) with an rxvt release (a still popular terminal program). In the next few months, fvwm became an independent package and fvwm-1.0 was released in fall, still 1993. Originally, the "F" in fvwm stood for "feeble". But then, Rob seems to have forgotten this at some point in time and thus the famouse FAQ question 1.1 was born. But although there is strong evidence on the meaning of the "F" in old new group archives, we nowadays prefer the "mysterious F" interpretation ;-) I know litte about what happened between 1993 and 1996. Rob stopped to maintain fvwm and Charles Hines took over the project for several years(?). When Chuck resigned, Brady Montz became the new maintainer for a couple of months, I believe in late 1997 or early 1998. Anyway, it took almost 8 month between the 2.0.45 release (22nd of January, 1997) and 2.0.46 (20th of August, 1997). I can only guess why, but probably this was a foresign of Chuck's approaching retirement. At this time I had been using fvwm-2.0.x for about two years at home and wanted to implement some of the features I liked in CDE to fvwm. In December 1997 I sent Brady my patches and never got an answer. I tried again half a year later, and contacted the mailing list, but fvwm development was as dead as it could be. Then - I believe it was in September or October (I have to look this up in the mailing list archive) - Brady resigned and everybody on the mailing list thought this would finally be the end of fvwm development. Seeing this and not willing to give up fvwm this easily, I took over the job as fvwm maintainer for the moment. After a lot of discussion we agreed that we should try to make a first stable release in the 2.x series as soon as possible. With a grat team effort we were able to resolve the most pressing issues and managed to get the stable 2.2.0 release out the door in February 1999. (I want to thank all the people who helped to make it possible back then). My memory of the sequence of events is a bit foggy. Some time in late 1998 or early 1999 we decided that having a single maintainer as the master over the code wasn't such a hot idea. In the past, people had been eager to work on fvwm but had been hindered by the maintainer, or more precisely: by the absence of a maintainer. As a result, almost no work had been done in fvwm for over one and a half years. So I gave up my role as the maintainer and the responsibilities were since taken over by the people on the fvwm-workers list. Unfortunatly I'm still stuck with most of the project organizing work. Anyway, since that day in October 1998 when a complete X newbie couldn't keep his mouth shut fvwm development is as active as it will ever be. Some of the people that helped to make 2.2 possible left and some became less active, but we still have an excellent team here (with a weakness in writing documentation). Although I'd rather not single out anyone, I have to mention Olivier Chapuis and Mikhael Goikhman who are doing an excellent job in providing some framework (configure, fvwm-themes, internationalization, not to mention all the nifty features in the fvwm core they have written). Although at times it might appear as if I am the one that keeps fvwm alive, fvwm wouldn't be half as good without the help of the many people on the mailing lists, be it by writing bug reports, complaining about missing features, answering questions of other users or simply encouraging us to continue our work. What about the future? Well, the work for the next stable series (2.6.x) is proceeding very well. Fvwm will go into feature freeze again near the end of the year so that 2.6 is ready before fvwm's tenth birthday on 1st of Junly, 2003. I have vague plans for a big event on that day to remind people that fvwm is still there and that it can easily compete with any other window manager. After that there are plans for a version 3.0 that would change a lot of the syntax and introduce fantastic new features, but that's too far from now. > Perhaps it'd be worthy of a page on the FVWM website too? That is definitely going to be done for fvwm's birthday. Bye Dominik ^_^ ^_^ -- Dominik Vogt, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Visit the official FVWM web page at <URL: http://www.fvwm.org/>. To unsubscribe from the list, send "unsubscribe fvwm" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To report problems, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
