Hi, Thanks everyone who participated in the community discussion at the EDD - it was really helpful to get an idea of what we're all working toward. Partly as a record for us and partly to open discussion for those who could not make it here are my notes of the conversation.
Apologies that this is a long email - I wanted to maintain much of my note so as not to add too much interpretation. for the impatient here is the TL;DR: The EFL community is mostly focused on the great libraries, desktop application and core utilities that can be built alongside them. We want to engage a lot of developers to either help or build on our stuff. There are a lot of ways to start work in that direction in addition to writing great code. P.S. As a community we are not a distribution and we are not writing an entire desktop system :) --- We started with a discussion of what Enlightenment is to us :) Enlightenment started as a window manager, we did a lot of work to refactor out cod and got great libs - these can now be used to support other apps - enlightenment is one app (the main one) that uses them. We build lots of apps - but we're not trying to do a desktops - bodhi is a desktop, but that is a different group with different aims Summary being: we write cool stuff that underpins lots of apps - a slick set of libraries that we build on and hope that others will too --- So from here how do we engage more people? Avoid the challenges of packaging everything with an app finder rather than doing the distribution Have a central developer setup (like Edi) making it really easy to build something - a core part of this would be to make it easy to patch / improve / contribute Apps exist that *we* don't know about EFL is the main thing that enables all of this, but that's not a community aim - toolkit is driven a lot by external factors that are not application developers Lots of development aid tools coming out of Samsung as they are needed to build well Summary: we could engage more developers through better app distribution and tooling but it's outside of scope for the EFL community --- So we then discussed what the community is: Transparency of the community - how can we help people to evaluate if actions or additions are in our desired direction Missing a roadmap for the years ahead - what do we want to achieve? - seamless look, feel, config - apps working great together etc E to have the core things for a great desktop - file manager, looking etc - managing screens blah blah - not with a browser, email etc - but we are building it anyway Not just a desktop environment - not just PCs and traditional setup - tablet hybrid etc - would need to adjust things like UI / layout etc according to device We could set up a tablet (or hybrid) for testing - cross compiling etc. - not really there as a supported platform just now * needs a virtual keyboard * helping developers adapt the apps to platform requirements - might need new APIs (device discovery etc) Elm profiles should be reviewed, naming fixed, but basically used to determine environment ? perhaps adding TV / wearable etc * Can applications advertise which modes it plays well with? - behaviour would be per-window but config is currently not limited by the opinion of those who create the hardware Summary: As a community we want to enable great apps to work consistently on a wide variety of platforms (device and modality) but we currently don't have a roadmap of how to get there. Additional support would be needed esp. in the higher level APIs to do this (lots of the mobile stuff, for example, closed source within Samsung) --- So what can we do to push forward?: Deliver to users / dev the "holy crap" moments that draw people in - killer features / apps Provide more help / support to community users / devs ** Extract useful info from the develop git and publish responsibilities and contact info to the website * have a place to publish and download approved EFL apps (bypass distributions) - on top of a solid operating system ;) (This is very similar to what EFLer wants to do, but needs release/packages - or should it be containers) * Blog posts / app evangelism - more out to the community to get further ways in ** Add slack to community page - see if people appear before working on more stuff... * compare user numbers with the IRC / existing devs * enable docuwiki plugin on the website to chat in Should we add a forum? (bodhi one is good) - but would it support our group? Folk are not keen for more private slack channels - providing room per app / topic category would perhaps mimic the forum benefits - could have topics mirrored into the main channel Can we solve the fragmentation between mailing list and phab? - chats about issues etc across many platforms * See if there is interest in getting the Facebook pages back up / maintained? * Find a way to have commercial support for the community EFL interfaces for things that are not C - it makes application development slow - only python is maintained and it's partial right now - C++, NodeJS, Lua coming as part of eo - a PoC Python replacement and C# is in the works - raster for lua/Node as app language * we should decide what bindings we will support development in (enabled by default) - i.e. Edi support etc ? is Rust an interesting language Summary: There is actually a lot of stuff we could do to move forward with just now - better visibility of what we're doing on the website for a start. From there start to clarify what we will support as core and what will come with Eo interfaces in the future. How could we better support developers using EFL? --- And lastly how would we get more E users? EFL and E should get packaged for some systems - that is the entry point for many - "extra" could be a module in E or shipped with EFL - whilst playing nice with system installer (don't conflict) Could be containers / images not app folders bundles (looking for simplicity like OS X) --- Please let me know if you think I have missed anything there. I will start to progress some of those topics but I would be keen to see if anyone else wants to pick up certain things? Whilst a lot of people on the list are primarily devs I know we have a lot of other great experience that we should draw on to grow this exciting community! Thanks, Andy -- http://andywilliams.me http://ajwillia.ms ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
