Dropping Matchbox UI unless a maintainer steps up
3 months ago I made #284 (closed), indicating that Matchbox doesn't have a maintainer. It's basically unmaintained upstream, and no one in postmarketOS seem to care enough for it to step up.
After a discussion with the team, we've decided to make this issue, and if no one within a month steps up to maintain it, I'll make a MR to drop it from our repositories. If still no one steps up within a week, we'll merge it.
CC @dguthrie as you added Matchbox originally, and CC @drebrez as you upstreamed some Matchbox parts to Alpine.
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I don't think it has been useful enough - so would vote to drop it. Some people on the IRC channel were saying they experienced crashes in the desktop component. I couldn't reproduce that, unfortunately.
I would argue the window-manager component still has use:
- Note that it is already e.g. built as a library for the Hildon components.
- It might be worth making it a single package, one subpackage building it as a library and the other building it as an X window manager that can be used.
- It is reliable
- It is useful for building e.g. set-top boxes and PDAs, as it presents one X window at a time.
I have no time to maintain this unfortunately. Nonetheless I think it's probably not the only unmaintained piece of software in the repositories.
By Duncan Guthrie on 2019-10-01T12:39:09
Edited by Ghost User-
It is useful for building e.g. set-top boxes and PDAs, as it presents one X window at a time.
So basically like Cage but for X instead of Wayland? In that case I rather just have those setups use Cage instead as X is on it's way out and should imo not be promoted on mobile.
By Bart Ribbers on 2019-10-01T12:39:09
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@dguthrie If you make the matchbox WM as sperate package then it will be great.
We can use the CoreStuff and this as WM, it will be great combination. @PureTryOut as we discussed in IRC, Can we use this?
By rahmanshaber on 2019-10-01T12:39:51
Edited by Ghost User
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@PureTryOut I've upstreamed to alpine just the matchbox keyboard (because at the time there weren't many alternatives for virtual keyboards). I'm not interested in other stuff from matchbox.
By Daniele Debernardi on 2019-10-26T14:57:15
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I don't think it will be any good. Contributor done some work to add this package to pmos. That will be wasted.
The better solution will be wait for the pmos stable and keep this unmaintained packages until then. Then remove this packages.
By rahmanshaber on 2019-10-27T14:55:04
Edited by Ghost User -
Contributor done some work to add this package to pmos. That will be wasted.
I'm sorry, but I don't think that's a good argument. It's an unmaintained UI, both on our side and on the upstream side. It might work fine now, but with packages it depends on being updated over time, it might eventually not anymore. Besides, we don't even know if it has security problems and if it does, we can't fix it. This is a whole new issue on itself.
However, the actual issue now is that we don't have a maintainer for Matchbox. If somebody wants to step up then we'll keep it in for now (although I still think dead upstream is a big issue on itself). We just need someone to point at and say "hey this UI is broken, can you look into the issue?". If you want to keep this UI, do you want to step up as maintainer? If so, please make a MR setting yourself as such for all Matchbox packages.
By Bart Ribbers on 2019-10-27T14:55:04
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I suggest to add a fancy list of available UIs (with screenshots), and potential UIs (unmaintained or planned) on the main website (not in the documentation).
This way, people will be more exposed to the current state and the potential of postmarketOS AND also see what UIs can be made available.
This will definitely grow the chances of getting more people involved with Linux on portable devices.
By GreenLunar on 2023-02-09T19:08:02
mentioned in commit aa2e6e2b
By Bart Ribbers on 2019-11-08T16:54:06
mentioned in merge request !729 (closed)
By Bart Ribbers on 2019-11-08T16:55:43
mentioned in commit 13b2f243
By Bart Ribbers on 2019-11-09T17:47:49
mentioned in commit 6ba8b2d7
By Bart Ribbers on 2019-11-17T14:13:58
mentioned in commit wiki@b51c8d05
By postmarketOS Wiki bot on 2019-11-17T14:43:53
mentioned in issue #1714 (closed)
By GreenLunar on 2023-02-09T19:02:02
