[478] in Athena User Interface
Status update
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sat Nov 4 01:11:52 2000
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 01:11:43 -0500
Message-Id: <200011040611.BAA06825@egyptian-gods.MIT.EDU>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
We've been having some discussions during release-team time (without
taking minutes) regarding aui planning, and I thought I would let
people know where we are.
We have one full-time staff member (amb) mostly dedicated to technical
aui work, plus some of my time, and about four months to have things
substantially ready for the Athena 8.4 release. That's not really
enough resources to do a good job of integrating all of gnome.
So, we've come up with an ordered list of tasks such that we can stop
at any point (because we've run out of time, or slowed down the
default login on a Sparc 5 too much already, or whatever) and still
have a visible improvement in the next Athena release. My conception
may not be the same as everyone else's, but it goes something like
this:
1. Integrate gnome libraries. In progress.
2. Integrate sawfish with an appropriate theme, and make it
the default window manager (possibly with an exception for
people with .mwmrc files).
2a. Maybe change the default background.
3. Integrate panel into the release as a replacement for dash.
Resolve issues of how much control we retain over the menus
and launchers the user sees. This may drag in some other
stuff, like gnome control center, in which case we need to
make sure all that other stuff actually works in our
environment.
4. Integrate a file manager into the release, assuming
nautilus is ready for prime time.
5. Other stuff.
There is a good chance that we will punt on gnome's session
management. There are a lot of intrinsic problems with it in a
multi-platform environment, and it seems more likely to cause
difficult bugs.
