Stefan Seefeld <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>Andreas Beck wrote:
>
>> Yeah, I know - all that sounds pretty pessimistic. And I always
>> feel pretty sad, when it comes to that topic. GGI is "my baby" more
>> than any other open source project. And there is quite some blood,
>> sweat and tears I and several other people put into it, so it
>> really hurts to see it fall in decay. I'm pretty busy these days
>> juggling two jobs, so I don't have so much time left to work on
>> GGI. While this is bad for GGI, it helps a little to distract me
>> from my "broken heart" about the project's state.
>>
>> But maybe some folks here would like to cheer me up a little ?
>
>hey Andreas, we need GGI !! :)
>
>in GGI on the other hand, I see lots of little effords here and
>there, a very high number of new sub projects, which are
>unfortunately almost never driven to some final point of usability
>(for other than the developers themselfs). The lack of releases is a
>good indicator. Just to name a few: GGI2D, GGI3D, XMI, MesaGGI. I
>name these because they could be very interesting for berlin, yet
>none seems in a state where it makes sense for us to found other
>software on it (we use pluggable renderers which implement the
>'DrawingKit' interface. We currently have two, one for MesaGGI, the
>other for libart on GGI, but Jon told us that MesaGGI wasn't
>maintained any more...).
i think what ggi really needs is a deep breath, and a deep cleanup and
reorganization. if you download the sources, they are a mess. there
are sources that don't compile at all, and are known not to compile.
libraries are hidden in a sea of directories, etc. imho the
distribution has to be rethinked. as it stands now it kind of scares
potential users/developers. here's my take on it:
i think it would be better for the future of ggi if a new release
started from scratch, in small steps. so you could release first just
libggi and a few drivers (X and framebuffer, for example). forget the
svga driver and others for a while, and don't even think of XMI and
stuff. a small and clean distribution that runs on X and the console
is an excellent first exposure to the project and its philosophy. it
needs some documentation, but the programmer's guide is not that bad.
when the release is ready, post it on comp.linux.something and people
will look at it, believe me. just don't make the other stuff available
or people can get scared. point: don't show something that doesn't
look very good.
when this small release is really well sorted out, clean and nice,
then it would be time to start releasing new drivers in separate
packages, so that the original distribution is not blown up and keeps
itself maintainable. each driver release should go together with
release announces in high-profile newsgroups. people will look at ggi
even more - "hey, these guys are going forward, they even have a
driver for my graphics card, i should definitely do something with
it!"
then comes the other libraries (XMI, GGI2D, etc), which must be
completely separated from the ggi distribution and from each other. i
still recall trying to find XMI among the mess of directories and
makefiles and everything, and then trying to compile it.
summarizing, *if it's not in perfect state, dont release it!* we
already have something good for hackers and with programming
knowledge, but sincerely and unfortunately this state of affairs won't
take ggi anywhere. if you really want a bright future (which is very
very within your reach) you will have to, at some point, rethink how
everything is distributed and organized.
then comes the part of getting people aware. those release
announcements at comp.linux will sure do the job. want another simple
way? XGGI. every time you see somebody on some newsgroup or mailing
list asking `i can't make X work blah blah', send a message `recompile
your kernel with framebuffer support, use XGGI and X will work with no
configuration needed.' you can also contact people with new
interesting projects and make them aware that with simple
modifications to their code, their applications would work anywhere
(X, console, etc) with the same binary. i've done that, got people
intersted, but in the end they got sort of scared with the state of
affairs of the current distribution. and so on and so forth.
>If you don't find the time to work yourself on it, may be you could
>try to give the project some more structure (in terms of project
>management), a task/request list for example, and act merely as a
>coordinator/mentor. I'm sure people will help if they see that GGI is
>still actively worked on.
people *love* to work on graphics stuff. transfer ggi to sourceforge,
only put there the new releases (not what you have now), and post a
request for developers with a flashy description of what ggi is. if
this task/request list is well organized and realistic, i bet there
will be people there eager to dive into code.
keep the good work!
--
Cesar Augusto Rorato Crusius __o __o __o __o __o
Stanford University _`\<, _`\<, _`\<, _`\<, _`\<,
e-mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (_)/(_) (_)/(_) (_)/(_) (_)/(_) (_)/(_)
www.stanford.edu/~crusius
o _ _ _
__o __o __o __o /\_ _ \\o (_)\__/o (_)
_`\<, _`\<, _`\<, _`\<, _>(_) (_)/<_ \_| \ _|/' \/
(_)/(_) (_)/(_) (_)/(_) (_)/(_) (_) (_) (_) (_)' _\o_
He who sacrifices functionality for ease of use
Loses both and deserves neither
