On 30/04/2016 07:13, Isaac Dunham wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 08:09:27PM +0200, Danilo Schöneberg wrote:
>> Moin,
>>
>> There is one system left I'm checking out the build for - Linux From
>> Scratch. I'm building it right now (the system. Not CDE yet).
>>
>> I have ten days of vacation coming up,  I was thinking about what to do.
>> I'm completely useless at sitting around idly for more than two days. So I
>> was thinking about some ideas:
>>
>> 1) A CDE-based Live-CD
>
> Look at CDEbian; I think it's not active any more, but it should be
> helpful.
> On this note, work on making the install scripts more suitable for
> packagers would be very helpful.
>
>> 2) researching integration of some modern technologies (like automount of
>> devices, udev, sound systems)
>
> As far as automount goes, it would seem that if you have a panel in dtfile
> that lists block devices, you could create an action for block devices
> that would call your automounter/open dtfile at the mount point.
>
> As far as sound support goes, there's a whole lot of APIs under *nix.
> I'd suggest that the best approach would be
> -get a separate mixer program working
> -make sure it can be embedded in the dtwm front panel
> The first place I found is "CDE frontpanel embeds sdtperfmeter-but how?":
> http://www.verycomputer.com/168_b0cb70320892a5a3_1.htm
> xmmixer is the first program that comes to mind, but there are a couple
> others; I'm not aware of any work towards embedding these.

xmmixer was designed for use with OSS and is working at least on Linux 
with ALSA and OSS emulation. However, except for Slackware, Linux 
distributions have moved to PulseAudio, and I am unsure OSS 
compatibility remains.

>
> If you're talking about 'sound theme'-type deals where you need to modify
> CDE to play a sound when you click on a certain item, please don't.
> (I, for one, don't like the modern stuff that "blinks, beeps, and dances".)
>


>> 3) "modernizing" some of the dt apps (mail, text editor, dtlogin)
>
> Modernizing dtmail to some extent sounds nice.
> My own wishlist would be IMAP support, and perhaps xmhtml integration.
>
On the IMAP access, dtmail has an option of using a custom retrieval 
command in the "Mail Retrieval" menu. Could fetchmail(1) be used to 
retrieve messages from an IMAP server for dtmail ? That would already 
mitigate the current limitation.

> Don't touch Webkit; it's a security nightmare and a bottomless pit for
> time.
> One of the GTK webkit developers wrote about the security status of the
> ports; it seems that gtkwebkit sporadically gets some security updates,
> the others get none, and there's no channel or protocol for communicating
> about vulnerabilities between ports. In essence, it's several projects
> that happen to use a single tree.
> Besides that, webkit regularly breaks API, requiring periodic rewrites.
> Timewise, you might get a port ready in a few months.
>
>> 4) code cleanup (warnings)
>
> This would be the best, I think.
>
>> What would be the preferred option from the team point of view? This also
>> brings up another question. What is the long-term goal? Do we try to keep
>> CDE running as it is or are there plans to actively develop it into a next
>> generation?
>
> As far as I can tell, the goal is
> * clean it up
> * make the parts conform to relevant standards underneath.
>   - there was talk about using libmagic for filetype detection
>   - there was talk about using *.desktop rather than *.dt actions
>   - dtwm needs EWMH for modern programs to act nicely
>   - tooltalk to dbus migration came up; dbus is apparently an incompatible
>     clone of tooltalk, so this might be relatively simple
>
>> For instance, I would love to see some more applications
>> developed (like a really good ftp client, image viewer, perhaps adding some
>> HTML support to the mail client (either via XmHTML or maybe even webkit).
>> All based on Motif of course. It has all a UI needs. It may look a bit
>
> There were several Motif FTP clients in the past; I've never looked hard
> enough to say if any/which were good.
On the Motif FTP clients, besides AxyFTP [ftp.wxftp.seul.org/pub/wxftp/ 
]that I mentioned in a previous email, there is XmFTP 
[http://viraj.org/old/xmftp/index.html] and XDIR
[https://computing.llnl.gov/resources/xdir/xdir.html].
There are two older clients, xgetftp and moxftp. Only the first one 
seems to compile on a modern system, but it is unable to even list the 
contents of a directory.

Concerning editors, NEdit, Ted and XEmacs already support Motif. XEmacs 
21.4 can be compiled with support for CDE drag and drop. Ted 
http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/ allows to edit RTF files.

>
> For image viewers, Ida is quite good and the code is very clean, though
> the image format support is pretty limited, and it can't set the desktop
> background (that's a longstanding TODO item, so patches are quite likely
> to be accepted).
> When I asked about whether CDE integration would be welcome, the maintainer
> was quite ready to accept patches. I don't think I got much feedback here,
> though. (Then I ended up switching to a much-less-compatible distro,
> where I've never tried building CDE. And now, I'm a week or so from going
> offline for the summer.)
>
> I already commented on XmHTML vs Webkit, and mentioned IMAP support for
> dtmail.
>
> Other roles where Motif programs are sorely lacking, IMHO:
> - A video player (I'd start with ffmpeg or libav, rather than gstreamer.
> But that's personal choice.)
> - An audio player. (You don't really need a dedicated one, if your 'video
> player' is properly set up.)
> - Something like the "X printing panel", where you can essentially build
> an 'lp' command line
> - web browsers, but these are *big* projects.

Concerning video players, MPlayer appears to be quite usable under CDE. 
Maybe building a control panel in the style of gmplayer, but using the 
Motif toolkit could be sufficient.
By contrast, xine crashes at startup under CDE with
  X Error of failed request:  BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter)
   Major opcode of failed request:  18 (X_ChangeProperty)
while it does not crash in Windowmaker.

For network applications, besides FTP, email clients and Web browsers, 
on could think of Motif IRC clients (Nebula is one, SmIRC is another one 
but apparently cannot be compiled with a recent g++), Motif instant 
messaging (https://github.com/gorais/gXipmsg) Motif RSS/Atom readers.

Something that could also be useful would be a graphical interface to 
set up wireless communications by listing possible access points and 
offering the possibility to run iwconfig/wpa_supplicant/dhclient to 
connect to the selected access point. But this is perhaps feasible using 
only dtksh scripting.

> (Daydreaming...I'd like to see the video player done as a widget, which
> can be used for 'HTML5'-style video support in XmHTML, and then XmHTML
> hooked up to libcurl to create a web browser. I realize that this would
> not be a high-feature browser, having no JS/CSS, and only limited HTML,
> but IMHO the main reasons to use something newer than MosaicCK are:
> -a lack of any security support
> -Mosaic's network code is old and slow
> -it isn't possible to play video

There was a Web browser/HTML editor developed at INRIA called Amaya
ftp.vim.org/pub/ibiblio/apps/www/browsers/amaya/ that used an OSF/Motif 
interface. I think the more recent versions use WxWidgets to hide 
whether the underlying toolkit is GTK or Motif.

> Unfortunately, some knuckleheads have decided that a novel's worth of JS
> and CSS is the only way to show webpages...)
>
> Thanks,
> Isaac Dunham
>
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