Hello. Thank you for having me. I don't have anything to offer but i have some questions about Unity 7 source code.
I understand that you all are probably busy with 18.04 and all that stuff. Please consider this just an invitation to discussion, i do not insist on replies and i'm not requesting anyone to do investigation of any sorts. I would appreciate if someone could just point me into right direction or give a general advice. I'm puzzling myself with running Unity on a different distro and advanced for a bit but not quite. Please allow me to show what i have today, then i'll share some of my findings, i hope they will be interesting to hear for you too. I'm not sure if this mailing list would allow attachments, so here is link to screenshots on forum: https://forum.voidlinux.eu/t/offical-desktop-screenshot-thread/30/389 , i'm also attaching screenshots to this email if you don't want to open external links and attachments won't be stripped. What you see on screenshots is Unity 7.5.0 launcher and dash kind of running on Void Linux without any patches to Gtk, on compiz-0.9, at the top of the screen it's xfce4-panel with global menu applet. What i have installed are Gtk2 2.24.32 and Gtk3 3.22.29 as packaged by Void packages maintainers, source code i used for build is from https://launchpad.net/unity and other places on launchpad. My main finding was that some (actually most so far) components of Unity 7 can run on vanilla Gtk. I had to disable panel services build because it depends on ido (https://launchpad.net/ido) and ido depends on gtk-private, but launcher, dash, hud (frontend), shutdown and switcher built without errors (all standalone versions). Some components doesn't work (switcher), some doesn't work very well (launcher and dash), but it's more or less functional, launcher track windows and dash is capable of doing searches. I don't know, maybe some other components i didn't touch yet depend on gtk-private, but launcher and dash are what i'm mostly interested in at this moment. Dash works alright-ish and looks very promising, launcher works not so much alright-ish, but still looks rather promising than not. I tried to look into standalone launcher and dash and as far as i understand, it's just some example applications for testing or debugging. Do i understand this correctly or is it something else? Another my finding was that those standalone applications do not link with compiz: [alex@localhost build]$ ldd ./launcher/launcher | grep -i compiz [alex@localhost build]$ They link with nux, but not with compiz. I also do not have unityshell plugin installed into compiz. I understand that compiz is required to do desktop effects like scale and probably expo, but i'm actually interested in _not_ linking to compiz. IIRC scale could be initiated with some dbus message before, i don't know how it is now, anyways that's not the point, i'm pretty happy with what i've got so far, it's just information to whom it may concern. My main question: do you think it is theoretically possible to eventually re-purpose these standalone applications into full-fledged launcher and dash that do not depend on patched Gtk? I tried to debug launcher and progressed a little bit, but i had to dig pretty deep, in my opinion, i had to implement some missing bits of XWindowSystem for example. Does that ring a bell? Or maybe i'm trying to do some stupid thing and Unity isn't supposed to work like that? I would like to experiment with this more if that makes any sense and i'm looking for any documentation or advice how to approach this. Is this the right place to ask such questions or other rather low-level questions about Unity source code? I'm interested in what bits could be potentially reused for standalone Unity apps, general info on Unity architecture, any hints to why some particular features might not work in standalone apps, etc. Can i ask such questions here? Thanks in advance.
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