Hi All, To avoid the recent insanity of post-CVS-commit warring, I'm giving you all a heads up to an app that will soon be heading to the CVS Tree shores.
The Entropy File Manager is not so much a file manager, as it is a message-based file-system aware engine. I'll explain what I mean by that in a second. The entropy drop will be comprised of two parts: The EVFS application that is already in CVS in apps, and the entropy application itself. EVFS is the successor to EFSD (though it still lacks a few features that EFSD had), though it is much larger-scope. It supports abritrary file systems (such as the samba demo currently in the tree), and will attempt to fix mistakes that gnome-vfs made (talk to me on #edevelop for my take on that one). Of course, EVFS has a long way to go, and a lot is just skeletal right now, but it works. The entropy application itself, at it's core - is just a messaging hierarchy with a few bells and whistles. It accepts requests (e.g. load this directory and it's contents, get their mime type, thumbnail them, and tell me when you're done). This has been the source of some controversy, due to the fact that it uses pthreads - and, as we all know, EFL+Pthreads = sqrt(-1). To prevent thread problems, entropy uses ecore_ipc as a notify system to the main thread to signal that event data is ready to be used. Entropy-Core also defines a GUI plugin and layout hierarchy. There are four main types of GUI plugin: layout-plugins (a container for other GUI elements), structure viewers (think of the tree-layout paradigm at the left of windows-explorer style systems), local-viewers (folder-contents), and action plugins (event consumer/response units). Each plugin has an event-consumer function of its own, and as such the GUI component is completely free to decide what it looks like, and how it displays the information passed to it - as long as it's parent layout knows what to do with the visual that is supplied to it. I chose this message-driven plugin paradigm to ensure that an entropy-GUI can look like anything that you want - even text based, if that is your thing. It certainly seems that this is the season for file managers, after the recent addition of the new EFM to the E window manager. Entropy aims to start where the new EFM stops - not to say that there won't be significant feature overlap. Entropy's main benefit is the ability to link to libraries that EFM can't right now - e.g. epsilon, imlib, evfs to name a few. I am not aiming to detract from the wonderful work that CodeWarrior has contributed in the form EFM - the two of us are in complete support of each others work. I aim for the two systems to be as complimentary as possible, and thanks to the various provisions of the EFL they should blend in together smoothly. The primary interface in this first drop of Entropy will be EWL-based, and most likely the largest EWL application to yet arrive (of course I could be wrong). Please do not let this further the violent debate over the superiority of either EWL or ETK. For one thing, when entropy was started several months ago, ETK did not exist. Of course, if someone wants to more completely develop the existing 'etk_layout_simple' example GUI that will hit CVS with entropy, they are free to do so. That's the idea. There is still significant work to be done on Entropy, but the base-API is stable enough now to at least hit the 'proto/' branch. It may well move to apps in the near future, but I'll first guage people's reactions. Significant cleanup work will be going on in entropy_core in the near future, so give me a shout on #edevelop if you're going to start hacking at it - I'll be glad for the help. There are a few mem-leaks to be careful of too, but it should be ok for most purposes. Entropy has been tested on Linux and OSX, and BSD-variants should also work. Please let me know if you are having compile issues. Well, this has turned out longer than I intended, but at least we can have a CVS addition that is out in the open for once. Cheers, Alex. -- Alexander Taylor (chaos) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
