[2531] in Release_7.7_team
Minutes of the 2000-01-10 release-team meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Jan 10 14:25:20 2001
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 14:25:12 -0500
Message-Id: <200101101925.OAA05990@equal-rites.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu
CC: aui@mit.edu
(AUI people: AUI items start at #4.)
Attending: ghudson aurora amb rbasch wdc zacheiss ajfox othomas miki edolan
jweiss
1. Matlab
Last week Greg said he would look into patches to the Sun JVM, but
after thinking about it, that's unlikely to help, since Matlab ships
with its own JVM. So we probably can't identify patches to try on our
own.
2. Solaris 8
Bill has contacted Sun about getting Solaris 8 source. (This kind of
gates doing serious work on the install/update.) He has also
contacted Sun about having real cnboot support.
We should use the November 2000 hardware update in order to have
support for their new line of Ultra machines.
Netscape 6 is apparently only available for Solaris from Sun, which
will probably pose all sorts of problems for todd.
3. Upgrades of stuff in third/
We should probably upgrade krb5 and xscreensaver, at least. There are
some other things like bash which we might consider upgrading. We
will not be upgrading lprng.
4. NOCALLS in an aui world
GNOME software doesn't mesh with NOCALLS ("Login without
customizations") so well because it writes configuration as well as
reading it. We have a couple of options for how to handle NOCALLS,
none of them great.
Consensus is that we should set an environment variable during such
logins which disables both reading and writing of gnome_config
profiles in the user homedir. This means users won't be able to use
the GUI to fix problems with their configuration, but it's probably
the sanest way. (And it's the least work, aside from ignoring
NOCALLS entirely.)
5. Dash fallback
We will support a fall-back to the dash/mwm interface via a home
directory dotfile. (This way easy to set/unset automatically, and
it's also easy for us to estimate how many people are using it.)
We'll have a menu option in both the new interface and in the 9.0 dash
menus to toggle back and forth.
A tentative way this fits into the menus is that we'll have a
top-level system menu called "Settings" which will contain:
* Global preferences (gnomecc)
* Revert to default GNOME configuration (mv ~/.gnome ~/.gnome.backup)
* Revert to old Athen user interface (touch ~/.athena_dash_interface)
The latter two options will actually run programs which pop up
confirmation dialog boxes, probably.
6. 8-bit support
It's looking harder and harder to avoid color creep in the new
interface. We may have to recommend that users of 8-bit displays
(which we'll be supporting for 18 months) use the dash fallback.
7. Panel menus
The panel has a "main menu flags" property which determines what
happens when you right-click on an unoccupied part of the panel.
Users who run gnomecc and edit these flags may be confused into
thinking they are editing the menu which comes up when you click on
the menu applet.
It is possible to configure a menu applet so that it is the same as
the panel context menu, but (a) it is not clear that we want those
menus to be the same; the panel context menu should probably not be a
general-purpose menu, and (b) this still leaves a rough edge in the
configuration of the main menu, since if the user right-clicks on the
menu applet and selects Properties, the user won't be able to edit the
menu flags without divorcing the menu applet from the panel context
menu.
Consensus was that we should leave the two menus divorced, and hack
the panel capplet so that it calls the main menu a "context menu"
instead of a "main menu". This seems like a reasonably small
divergence from GNOME. (And maybe we can get it accepted upstream.)
8. Themes
Greg passed around samples of three themes (Eazel, CoolClean,
sawSlate). Consensus was that Eazel is really pretty and we should
use it.
Consensus was that we should not move the close button over to the
left side. Yes, there is a fairly serious usability issue with having
the close button next to minimize and maximize, but moving it over to
the left is contrary to the habits of both Windows and existing mwm
users, and could lead people to clicking close when they expect to
bring up a window manager menu.
9. Other AUI status
We need to pick a gnome-terminal font. It will be 12-point
semicondensed, since normal 12-point won't fit two 80-column windows
side by side on an 1152x900 display, and that's what the Ultra 5s
have.
We'll need to write code to deal with the logout confirmation, since
we're not using gnome-session, which handles that normally.
10. Bleeding for non-Linux
Garry requested that we make one-time bleeding releases for Solaris
and IRIX. Greg will do that when this round of AUI stuff is
substantially done.
11. Version of next full release
It will be 9.0, unless we back out the aui stuff.
