Le 6 mai 06 à 08:28, Rolando Abarca a écrit :
All right,
I've been trying to process all the information you gave me... :-P
First, some questions popped into my head while reading the wiki,
Precognitive_FAQ and other stuff I found floating around (including
source code)
At this time, the Precognitive FAQ is a little bit outdated (I even
remember that I'm not sure really sure about some points mentionned
in this FAQ :-))
It is mostly due to the fact User Interface discussion is still
underway.
- FileManager == GWorkspace? or it's going to be rewritten from
scratch?
Rewritten from scratch for two reasons :
- it doesn't match Étoilé ideas
- its design and code are overly complicated and not always clear
(broken MVC, high coupling between classes) imho
There is an experimental Workspace in /Services/Private/Workspace,
but it's based on a port of Filie which was really well written. The
last time I worked a bit on it in Spring 2005, my integration was
still very buggy, I stopped working on it because I thought
ExtendedWorkspaceKit design was wrong.
- WildMenus is intended to be "glued" in the System?
No, it's going to stay a bundle which overrides parts of AppKit menu
classes when the bundle is loaded. This kind of bundle automatically
loaded at application launch is a feature provided by GNUstep itself.
Take note there are two WildMenus version in the repository : an old
one and new fork called EtoileWildMenus (the one we use).
I mean, apps need
to be re-written to support this kind of menu system?
By the way no.
- Azalea will be the official Etoile WM?
Yes, until we move away from X11 which isn't going to happen anytime
soon. Anyway even the day we decide to use rely on some new Window
Server, we would still provide X11 compatibility as an option. Azalea
would still have a purpose then, even if it remains a X11 only WM.
- How will the current applications integrate into Etoile?
GNUstep applications will run smoothly but may not support every
Étoilé specific features if they have been updated to have optimal
support. We will try to support most of features by overriding parts
of Foundation and AppKit and moving away most of the burden from the
application developers.
for
instance The GIMP, Inkscape, Firefox,
etc?... will they need some sort of special port? (to support the menu
system?) or they will run in some sort of "external-support-mode"?
At this time, we have no plans to support smoothly such applications,
because Étoilé is a slight departure from current Desktop
Environments and it would make everything way more complicated. That
means they will run in their own way, isolated from Étoilé environment.
But if somebody is interested by improving KDE, GNOME applications
integration with our environment, it will surely be welcome (unless
it triggers unwanted side-effects on Étoilé project code itself).
For Firefox, the plan is to have our own Web browser based on WebKit,
that shouldn't be really hard because WebKit is truly full-featured.
Another option would be to port Camino browser part of Mozilla
project, it is based on Firefox rendering engine. The first missing
piece for porting Camino until recently was Objective-C++ support in
FSF GCC, the second one is Nib compatibility in Gorm because Camino
is including a huge number of .nib files that would be extremly
tedious to recreate one by one in Gorm. About Camino : <http://
www.caminobrowser.org/>
It could also be possible to work on custom version of Firefox for
Étoilé.
Once basic stuff will be in place, the other big focus in Étoilé will
be related to creative applications like Image Editor, Page Layout etc.
I never really used Inkscape but neither GIMP or Photoshop convince
me, they are unnecessarily complex or poorly untuitive when you move
away from very basic uses. Finally they doesn't scale well when you
decide to use them in tandem with other applications like Pages
Layout, Vector editor etc.
Banlu Kemiyatorn has done interesting work on a Bitmap framework
called Maliwan and has written a diagramming framework called
DiagramKit with simple yet nice vector features. Maliwan integration
in Étoilé is definitely planned. On Maliwan : <http://home.gna.org/
garma/maliwan/> and Maliwan blog : <http://maliwan.blogspot.com/>
DiagramKit is part of gsimageapps project at this time iirc.
I have also interest in a vector framework, they are few interesting
open source ones available, but from API viewpoint they are always
too much complex in my opinion (written in C++ by the way). An
interesting attempt could be to write a framework providing a unified
API for both 2d and 3d vector related operations, it would rely on a
backend operating purely on 3d curves or shapes. Just an idea, but
might be not really realistic, I haven't found time to investigate it
at all.
As a side note, we have interest to support some parts of Freedesktop
specifications when they doesn't interleave with Étoilé in a messy
manner and their design meets our expectations.
For example, IconKit has partial support for Thumbnails spec. The
default image/icon format will be probably be PNG and not TIFF. etc.
The Trash spec. is probably welcome too. Many other softwares or
specs are probably interesting to adopt like Cairo, HAL etc.
Now, after reading a lot, I have a more complete idea of the purpose
and objectives of Etoile. Although I do not share some of the ideas of
the Precognitive_FAQ, I think it's a really, really interesting
project.
I hope so ;-)
I think I could start working MenuServer and Azalea integration, once
I figure out how to install Azalea in the first place :-P
make && sudo make install at the root of the repository (aka /trunk/
Etoile), then you can start the whole Étoilé environment by launching
etoile_system daemon that installs in /usr/local/bin… At this time,
it seems there is a bug in the MenuServer which results in keeping
busy CPU most of time (like 75 %), making the system unusable.
You can start Azalea alone just by typing in an xterm without a WM
running : openapp Azalea
Another thing I could do, is what quentin suggested:
"Improve the set up process : Nesedah theme in the repository and
installed with Camaelon, script to set defaults at the end of the
install phase etc.."
That would be cool.
Quentin.
--
Quentin Mathé
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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