Development update and plans

[Scott Moynes]

Hi folks,

First, an update:
After the first alpha of openbox3, we've found it necessary to change
some of our support policy. The IRC channel is no longer an official
user support channel. Any questions about configuration, feature
requests, bug reports should be sent to this mailing list so they can
be answered with the focus they deserve and archived for use on the
web page. Bug reports should also go into our bug tracker
http://bugzilla.icculus.org so they can be properly handled.
We found that many of the same questions were being asked in the IRC
channel and proper support was not possible via IRC.

Now for some development plans:
I have been promising and planning work for the menus for far too long
and I'd like some feedback on what people actually would like from the
menus.
Currently, we have a plugin system in place that would provide custom
menus. It isn't quite complete or useful right now, but I am unsure if
anyone wants this functionality.
For those who need some background, the menu plugins can provide
different behaviours, in a really general sense, to the menu
system. For example, I have a menu type that can be updated through a
FIFO file something like
 cat NEWMENU >~/.openbox/fifo_menus/name
That in itself isn't terribly useful, but combined with some scripts
it could do anything from making your mp3s available in the menu, to
background image selectors.
Now, most of what i have planned could be implemented with just FIFO
menus but to make things more friendly I intend to add ones that run
commands occasionally, generate a menu that executes a command on each
files in a directory, and some others.

Now for quiz time:
Does anyone care about such a feature?
Would anyone care to create their own plugins?
Does anyone have requests?
Where are my pants?

After I get happy with the menus, or die trying, I have a few other
ideas that I'd love to see but doesn't appear that anyone else cares
enough to do them, so I guess I must.

So, that's about it.
Summary: IRC sucks for tech support, menus will suck without input.

Scott
-- 
Scott Moynes http://www.icculus.org/openbox/
"Computer science is as much about computers
as astronomy is about telescopes." -- Dijkstra