[1776] in Release_7.7_team
Athena desktop project
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Tue May 4 15:00:09 1999
Date: Tue, 4 May 1999 14:59:47 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <199905041859.OAA01123@nephthys.grey17.org>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: source-developers@MIT.EDU
CC: fuzzballs@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
One of our goals for the Athena 8.4 release is an update of the Athena
desktop's appearance and functionality. I'd like to get started on
that as soon as possible, since it's an ambitious project.
Dan has created a public athena-desktop mailing list for communication
about the project. Please add yourself if you're interested, or
mention it to anyone in your team who you think might be interested.
The list is new, so you can't send mail to it until tomorrow. I
expect the list to cover all aspects of the project, including:
* Political: All the discovery stuff we might need to do to
justify staff time spent on the project. Primarily the
realm of managerial types.
* Technical: What is possible and how could we go about it?
Primarily the realm of developers.
* Specification: What do we want the desktop to look like, and
what functionality do we want it to provide? Primarily the
realm of support people.
[The rest is optional reading.]
I've looked a bit at KDE and Gnome on the technical side. What I've
found so far is:
* Gnome has a list of about eight prerequisite libraries,
including some which are no longer distributed outside of
Linux distributions, and one which is only interested in
building on Linux if you can get ahold of a tarfile. I
haven't gotten past sorting out the dependencies in a
reproduceable fashion, so I don't have much else.
* KDE is somewhat more of a finished project, but it's in
licensing hell. KDE itself is GPL'd code, but to make
actual binaries you have to link against the Qt library,
which is distributed under a no-modifications license not
compatible with the GPL. At some unspecified date in the
future, Qt is supposed to be released under the QPL, which
allows for the distribution of patches along with the
b,unmodified source. This is still not compatible with the
GPL. So we couldn't legally distribute KDE binaries.
There is a project underway to write a Qt-compatible library
called "Harmony," but to all appearances it doesn't have a
lot of steam and isn't anywhere close to there.
KDE and Qt are also heavily dependent on C++, a language we
haven't qualified for use in the Athena release. Assuming
they don't rely heavily on templates or RTT, we probably
wouldn't have much trouble dealing with that, but since I
hate C++, I'm not wild about it.
* Both packages are huge, gnome probably more so. gnome,
without its dependency libraries, is about 131MB of source
code (compare to 375MB of source code currently in the
tree). KDE is 28MB of gzipped source; I don't know how big
it is uncompressed.
