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Roadmap: from awesome 2 to awesome 3



Hello folks,

I'd like to make an update on current awesome developement.

awesome 2.2
-----------
awesome 2.2 was released some days ago and seems pretty good.
No important bug have been reported against it AFAIK.

So far, we're fine.

awesome 2.3
-----------
awesome 2.3 is in good shape, AFAICT and accordind to ghe BTS, the
roadmap is complete. You should expect a first release candidate
version the next week is everything goes fine.

This version add some news stuff like:
- Support for multiple image format, using Imlib2 (default) or GTK
  pixbuf;
- Use pango for font display instead of Xft. This has been decided
  to get rid of Xft which does not support XCB, see awesome 3.0;
  This will break the current font string format in configuration file.
- Better documentation: the documentation is now autogenerated from
  source code: everything is now in the manpage and will always be;
- awesome-menu: a dmenu clone, bringing the beginning of a real prompt
  in awesome;
- Support for styles section: there's no more hundreds of font/colors
  options everywhere, but styles sections which get everything inside
  and that can be overrident for each widgets;
- mwfact lower and upper limits are configurable;
- widget_tell now allows to change widget properties like colors, etc.
  This will break the current widget_tell string format, so you'll have
  to change a bit your script;
- Errors and warnings messages are more clear and consistent, prefixed
  with E or W and indicating in which function it fails;
- Add titlebar support for windows;
- Fix support for SDL apps (you can play Xmoto and Quake);
- New option for progressbar with ticks;
- New emptybox widget which deprecated padding options of various
  widgets;
- New opacity_focused option;
- Widget graph can grow right/left;
- Probably more.

Obviously, some code optimizing, rewriting, etc has been done, speeding
up various corner of the core. Some bug has been fixed, even if most 2.2
users did not trigger them.

Future of awesome 2
-------------------
After awesome 2.3 is released, the current master branch will be branched
to a maintenance one. That means awesome 2 will only get bugfixes
and no more big brand new features. The developement will be focused
toward awesome 3.

awesome 3
---------
awesome 3 will be the next generation of the awesome window manager,
with a first 3.0 release probably this summer.

Due to the amazing work of Arnaud Fontaine last months, we know have a
brand new awesome using XCB[1] instead of Xlib.

This will allow to speed up X usage in awesome by making asynchronous
requests to the X server.
Current work of Arnaud is usable but is mostly a synchronous portage of
awesome so there is still work to be done to port things in an
asynchronous way.  This is why this version is not yet complete.

This work will be presented by Arnaud by an email in the coming days,
so I won't elaborate too much now about this.

A lot of new things will probably get in during this developement, we do
not know what yet, and the BTS[2] is still the best place to have a good
overview.
Current plan implies XCB port, new multi head management, multi threaded
statusbar, etc. As usual, new feature requests can be opened on the BTS.

In the meantime, we hope that the XCB support in various OSes around
will get better. awesome 3 will need xcb-util and xcb support for cairo.

As always, have fun, be awesome,

Cheers,

[1] X C Bindings, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCB
[2] http://awesome.naquadah.org/bugs/
[3] http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/
-- 
Julien Danjou
// ᐰ <julien@xxxxxxxxxxx>   http://julien.danjou.info
// 9A0D 5FD9 EB42 22F6 8974  C95C A462 B51E C2FE E5CD

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