Yeah, in my opinion it should be easy to conceive a set of packages that
even eschews Firefox in favor of something more efficent (which is to
say, less complex to maintain, as well as smaller/faster), like Dillo
(dillo.org) for example.
Ross, Gary (G.A.) wrote:
I agree that some applications have become foundational. But let's also
look at where the client is going in general. In the Corporate world,
thinner clients are becoming in. Not necessarily just display devices,
like SunRay, but also having CPU and memory for local processing of some
applications like a browser, or media player. We'll call them "thin
PC's".
That said, applications do need to be divided into "foundation", and
"everything else". The foundation apps are part of the OS, and are
installed on each system. Everything else must be able to run off a
shared directory (NFS mount).
Care needs to be taken when labeling "foundation" apps. Too many of
them, and you have the same problem the LINUX environment is having,
with all of the interdependencies. Please let's not go down the path of
having to load 30 packages, just to get a single application running.
Just my $0.02, as a user and customer...
Gary A. Ross
Network Operations Architect
Ford Motor Company
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Phone: (313) 390-4313
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eric
Boutilier
Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 8:45 PM
To: opensolaris-discuss; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [desktop-discuss] Thoughts on freeware ports and GUI
library"sub-stacks"
Thinking (and toying with) the concept of a minimal desktop over the
weekend, I got to thinking about how Firefox has become an indispensable
desktop application, and how it is based on the GTK+ (Glib, etc.)
"sub-stack" library set. The point being that even for non-GNOME desktop
environments, Glib, Pango, ATK, et al. have become foundational. In
other words, these days that set of libraries are, for all intents and
purposes, no less essential than say, the X Window (Xorg) sub-stack.
Looking at things that way, it's also true that every Solaris freeware
stack project either diverges from OpenSolaris or not at the GUI (GTK+)
"sub-stack" level. For example, the independent distros have diverged --
albeit, out of necessity -- at this level. (Those projects have such a
broad scope they have to maintain their own GUI/GTK+ library stacks.)
In contrast, the projects that have not diverged (that I can think of)
are: The Companion project, Pat Mauritz' pmpkg project, the
spec-files-extra repository, and Sun's Firefox/Thunderbird ports (found
in the Mozilla contrib repo). In other words, these projects -- although
independent of each other -- standardize on a common GUI library base;
and therefore (correct me if I'm wrong here) together they comprise a
large pool of highly compatible ports.
Eric
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