[12] in Athena User Interface
Re: Athena User Interface Project seeks advice
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Tibbetts)
Mon May 1 15:38:18 2000
Message-Id: <200005011938.PAA29460@hikari-no-ken.mit.edu>
To: Dan Winship <danw@helixcode.com>
cc: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>, aui@MIT.EDU, tibbetts@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 01 May 2000 14:51:17 EDT."
<200005011851.OAA26799@twelve-monkeys.helixcode.com>
Date: Mon, 01 May 2000 15:38:14 -0400
From: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
On 5/1 Dan Winship <danw@helixcode.com> wrote:
> If you are hacking on existing apps, then the risk is as you stated,
> although Thomas seems to feel it's not as hopeless as you think.
I am currently uncertain of how much hacking we are going to be doing
on existing applications. I think there are a few places:
1) AFS and delete in the file manager.
2) Locker support in the "gnome menu" of the panel.
3) Locker support in the desktop.
4) gnome-print hacking?
(1) can almost certainly be done to both gmc and Nautilus, or to just
Nautilus. I think (as you said) that either would be happy to take the
patch upstream. This is not particularly painful.
(2) This is probably uninteresting to upstream people. Maybe we
implement "athena menu" as an applet, distinct from the gnome menu,
and have the athena panel not have a gnome menu. I have not yet looked
at the current panel architecture or the new one, but this solution is
likely to work across both.
(3) It is not yet clear how important this is, or how hard. Maybe just
requires making symlinks in users homedirs. I am not particularly
concerned.
(4) Is currently FUD. I have not looked at gnome-print, but I expect
that it will need some tweaking to work with athena. Possibly this
will be hacking that can be passed upstream. Not sure. gnome-print is
part of 2.0 anyways.
Did I forget anything else that we are going to need to hack? Make the
help browser locker aware or something?
> For new apps you're creating, the majority of the code you depend on
> will be in gnome-libs and gtk, and you absolutely don't want to be
> working with the unreleased versions of those (even Nautilus and
> Evolution don't), so there's no risk involved there. If you decide
> from the start "we won't use any of the new-in-2.0 support libraries",
> then there's no risk there either, you just deny yourself some cool
> new stuff.
That makes sense. I think that it is pretty clear that anything that
Athena develops should by default be based on the 1.0 libraries. We
really should avoid tracking unstable libraries, unless there is a
really good reason.
Real Soon Now I want to create a specific list of the things we are
going to write and the things we are going to change and how we are
going to do them. Better than the discovery team report, which was a
bit vague (no offense). Where is the final report of the discovery
team? I cannot seem to find it.
tibbetts
-*- http://www.mit.edu/~tibbetts -*- finger tibbetts@monk.mit.edu -*-
