Talk:Dwm/Archive 1

dmenu
Should dmenu get its own article? Both wmii and dwm use it, and it's not intrinsically tied to either of them... --Roguelazer (talk) 19:52, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Screencap
Would anyone object to me uploading a more aesthetically pleasing screencap? All the Linux screencap on Wikipedia are disgusting, which isn't really helping the stereotype. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.98.153.18 (talk) 09:12, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Train Wrecks
Does the fact that the deletion discussion has turned into a train wreck, for a second time, indicate that WikiLobbying is a very successful way to keep WP articles undeleted? cojoco (talk) 00:49, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Uh, if it was 'WikiLobbying' that was successful in this case, it doesn't seem it was by bringing out raving dwm enthusiasts -- I'm certainly not one -- but rather by showing how completely shocking the standards now being applied are -- especially to open source software. It simply exposed how wrong and immoral these 'principles' are to people. It is the individual case that makes one grasp the level of madness at issue. The mind is necessarily sickened by the thought of all the human thought and labor that have been simply destroyed by the application of the 'if the New York Times hasn't mentioned it it doesn't exist' principle to articles like the one about dwm. Chief sequoya (talk) 01:04, 4 March 2010 (UTC)


 * So do you think that there's a push to remove OSS articles, or do you think that the notability guidelines aren't appropriate for OSS? cojoco (talk) 02:08, 4 March 2010 (UTC)


 * This isn't a garage band or beta project that were started last Thursday. Notability guidelines are clearly faulty when something that hundreds or thousands of people use, write about or know about is not acceptable because there is no coverage in academic journals or traditional media.


 * Chief Sequoya is right. This is wrong and immoral. Bookburnings come to mind. --Wicked247 (talk) 11:14, 6 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Also, it's being discussed on the Administrator's notice board here cojoco (talk) 03:50, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Should be kept
Atleast keep the article and tag it as unreliable. It wouldn't be fair to the readers nor wikipedia nor the developers of DWM to delete it. Smeezekitty (talk) 18:12, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Unreliable is also incorrect. Simple fact of the issue here you do have direct source from the maker of product that to refer to. If it is suspected as unreliable should not the makers of DWM be asked to review it. Makers of product are available. Now if they are not trust worthy the source of program is also available to check that it does exactly what is described. DWM code is well commented by the way.

Using third party sources like journals and so one when you have access to the creator of the information themselves produces unreliable information. Marking unreliable is just a sneaky long term way to delete the article. Oiaohm1 (talk) 01:47, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I think "reliable" is meant in the context of WP:IRS; primary sources have unavoidable inherent bias and are therefore not "reliable" in terms of that policy (despite in some cases being reliable in the plain sense of the word). --Cyber cobra (talk) 02:13, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, in the case of Free Software, it should be obvious to anyone that primary sources can reliably be checked for consistency by anyone skilled in the field. Secondary sources may be a good complement, especially when stating opinions, but we can't reasonably rule out the primary source. If the policy contradicts me, maybe it should be amended.--Loup Vaillant (talk) 12:01, 21 March 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.236.43.227 (talk)

Keep the article, delete the deletionists wp accounts, problem solved and a more useful wikipeida for everyone, yay! Htaccess (talk) 02:38, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Keep the article, delete the bureaucrats and deletionists accounts, and wp will get more people helping in here. localghost (talk) 02:15, Apr 30 2010 (CST)

Notability
Didn't the deletionists get their fill of tagging all the WM articles with notability tags during the summer? Do we have to go through this again? --Roguelazer (talk) 17:49, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
 * There is no again verifying and cleaning up Wikipedia content is a constant process. Miami33139 (talk) 18:57, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah, Wikipedia's last bias -- "notability" --98.223.32.15 (talk) 16:33, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

From my point of view, this is a fine Wikipedia article which gives an informative and verifiable treatment of a topic that is relevant to the many people who use or develop custom window managers. Does including such articles make Wikipedia a "tabloid"? No. Taking WP:N this far is a terrible policy. "The length, depth, and breadth of articles in Wikipedia is virtually infinite. [...] Each of the 100+ poker games can have its own page with rules, history, and strategy. Jimbo Wales has agreed: Hard disks are cheap." -- Wicked247 (talk) 01:40, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

I just came here and learned about dwm. It was interesting. Now I'm thinking I might download those <2000 lines of code and see how it all works. How is wikipedia served by removing this? Is it really such a bad thing that whenever I want to learn about something, I google for it and know that one of the top results will be a wikipedia page, with a better introduction than I can get anywhere else? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.75.120.170 (talk) 02:03, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

I learned about dwm from a freebsd-mailinglist where it was considered an alternative for ion3 and activly use it. As one is required to edit C source code to e.g. modify keybindings, it probably will never gain attention in any "big" article of any "relevant" magazine/journal. If it helps I can write an essay on dwm. :P —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.189.255.25 (talk) 18:44, 12 March 2010 (UTC)


 * I do not want to assume authority here, but software usually notable if it's used. This particular piece seems to be quite popular as well (and gaining), please see Debian popularity graphs for dwm. Moreover window managers are not quite mainstream software, so it's really unexpected to see millions of users just to prove it's notibility. (I guess above a hundred debian-popcon users usually signifies software existance and usage.) Irrelevant infromation should be deleted, but in my opinion if it's at least a little relevant and informative it should be kept, and this one is more than that. -grin &#9998; 13:34, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Has no one read the DWM page because it contains reasons its Notability. Its part of history of quite a few different projects should we delete 386BSD from the wikipedia? because its not talked about enough? answer no it is history. Problem here dwm is also history and current at the same time. http://www.autohotkey.net./~joten/bug.n/description.html some of them based off dwm do talk about dwm and its features. Yes independent talking about dwm does go on in reviews of light weight windows managers like http://www.linuxgoodies.com/review_dwm.html and http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dwm not that hard to find neither done by the authors of dwm so is independent source. If I searched more I would find more independent sourced to base article here at wikipedia on. Personally I suspect simply that windows supporters cannot accept the fact that something else was using the name dwm before MS decided to use it. A request to rename to like dwm(X11) could have been fair if something else was found to be using the term dwm in larger numbers. That MS has duplicated the name for another software product doing windows management this is even more reason to keep the dwm as a mark why MS cannot trademark DWM and by delete the DWM(X11) article from existence is losing history of term usage from the Wikipedia. Now remember MS DWM was named DCE before MS renamed it. Nothing is preventing MS renaming it again. Open source projects it is almost impossible for them to rename. Do we have to make lists of sources longer than the article covering every time dwm has been covered. Sometime important here wikipedia rules are going to screw up with open source projects. Lot of open source world works by first source ie the author of the program describes program that is our description of program. The idea of Notability that open source project will always be talking about in media. Lot of cases with open source projects it will be nothing more than a link and a copy of the projects own description more than anything else. Yes distributions prefer first source over anything else. Be-aware distributions also write descriptions about applications they are some of the major open source world publishing of importance. This is why I say do you want more sources than length of article DWM is in a lot of distributions. And having your application in major distributions is very much each to being published in a journal. If program is not worthwhile users in the open source world have to build from source. Ie existence of distributions shipped binaries built by independent people to the main project itself is documentation of Notability since doing that takes time and effort. Note I said distributions Oiaohm1 (talk) 23:33, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Hows this for notability: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/going-fast-dwm (208.113.47.100 (talk) 18:46, 29 July 2010 (UTC))

notability tag
What coverage does this need in addition to this and the other links given in the article for dwm to be considered notable? strcat (talk) 06:04, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

AfD for cwm (window manager)
There is an AfD which seems essentially similar to those happening on dwm before. I would appreciate the comments on it. &mdash; Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 12:20, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

So, I just downloaded dwm
And dwm.c is over 2000 loc, 2147 to be exact. (the article says "One of the project's guidelines is that the source code will never exceed 2000 lines") — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.49.218.41 (talk) 17:36, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Wrong. As of version 6.0, dwm.c contains exactly 2146 lines, of which 60 are comment lines and 185 are blank, meaning that there are in fact 1901 LOC (counted using CLOC). —Iketsi (talk) 00:40, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
 * You are the wrong here sir. dwm.c contains exactly 2147 lines, and yes, I am including the last one. Yes, some of them are comments, and some of them are blank. Your point? Its source code still exceeds 2000 lines. --188.4.165.141 (talk) 16:23, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
 * The dwm website mentions that dwm's source code is intended to never exceed 2000 SLOC. The most common definition of physical SLOC is a count of lines in the text of the program's source code excluding comment lines. —Iketsi (talk) 22:22, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

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Influenced by
Here some thoughts and information for mentioning the influences to dwm:

After developing wmi and wmii, Anselm Garbe went for a simpler approach with dwm, focussing only on the most important features of wmii and a more dynamic behavior.

In https://web.archive.org/web/20060101012148/http://w3studi.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/~garbeam/wmii.pdf Garbe writes:


 * WMI: Yet another X11 window manager, which attempts to combine the best features of Ion, LarsWM and ratpoison into one window manager.


 * Next generation: WMII. WMI was the prototype. Reimplementation of WMI in C since Oct 2004. Uses some ideas of the Acme Programming Environment (plan9 OS).

The influences of acme AFAIK have not survived into dwm, but the influences of Ion/LarsWM and Ratpoison are clearly visible.

From the current website https://dwm.suckless.org/: In contrast to ion, larswm, and wmii, dwm is much smaller, faster and simpler.

LarsWM probably had been the largest influence technically. Ion is similar in many ways but has more features that are neither part of LarsWM nor dwm. The wmii influence probably is more the experience from developing and using it. The (here dropped) ratpoison influence seems to be the heavy relying on keyboard shortcut controls.

--Meillo (talk) 10:06, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Security of the C programming language
Overall point: nobody chooses the C programming language for security, and even keyboard and mouse events can be extremely hard to handle securely

From the article introduction (emphasis mine) dwm is written purely in C for performance and security in addition to simplicity

From the reference https://dwm.suckless.org/ on 10 Feb 2023 (emphasis mine): dwm is customized through editing its source code, which makes it extremely fast and secure - it does not process any input data which isn't known at compile time, except window titles and status text read from the root window's name. You don't have to learn Lua/sh/ruby or some weird configuration file format (like X resource files), beside C, to customize it for your needs: you only have to learn C (at least in order to edit the header file).


 * The reference source doesn't appear to be claiming that pure-C is secure, but that the lack of config files limits the attack surface. I agree that is an effective mitigation for a large number of filesystem permission and symlink attacks.
 * The source claims that the only dynamic input is window titles and status text . However, I think a Window manager needs to handle keyboard and mouse events. For example, dmenu is listed as being keyboard-activated. I understand that dmenu is not strictly speaking part of dwm, but the keyboard-shortcut-handler probably is.

✱ CVE-2015-7496 is a good example of the difficulty of handling keyboard events: it allows physically proximate attackers to bypass the lock screen by holding the Escape key.

My background: I don't know much about programming against the X Window System, I know less about the events Window managers need to handle, and I know nothing about dwm; however, I do know C and its pitfalls well.

Change suggestion for the intro: dwm is written purely in C for performance and simplicity, lacking any configuration interface besides editing the source code. Options meant to be user-configurable are all contained in a single header file, requiring users to recompile dwm after configuration updates. This approach eliminates many security pitfalls related to reading and writing configuration files at runtime. One of the project's guidelines is that the source code is intended to never exceed 2000 SLOC. Jratt (talk) 18:25, 10 February 2023 (UTC)


 * @Jratt: This makes sense to me, feel free to make the change. Dexxor (talk) 10:24, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Simple X Mobile
Should Simple X Mobile be mentioned in the article, or should it get its own wiki?

Sxmo is a fork of dwm that is made for mobile phones more specifically pinephones but it also works for other phones as well.

https://sxmo.org Johshh (talk) 11:56, 20 April 2023 (UTC)