[8] in Athena User Interface
Re: Athena User Interface Project seeks advice
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Winship)
Mon May 1 13:28:42 2000
Message-Id: <200005011730.NAA26643@twelve-monkeys.helixcode.com>
To: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
Cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 29 Apr 2000 11:24:53 EDT."
<200004291524.LAA27450@hikari-no-ken.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 01 May 2000 13:30:04 -0400
From: Dan Winship <danw@helixcode.com>
[I'm un-cc'ing gnome-devel-list because I don't want to deal with
Havoc. :) ]
> 1) What will the changes be between 1.0 and 2.0? If we modify the
> panel, or the file-manager, or other things, how much will we
> lose?
The file manager is being changed completely. (Out with mc, in with
Nautilus.) There is absolutely no shared code between them. So you'll
probably want your changes to be to Nautilus. FTR, Maciej Stachowiak
(now mjs@eazel.com) is one of the main Nautilus hackers, and he might
be interested in helping get "things Athena wants" into Nautilus.
(IIRC, it's mostly delete support and AFS fixes. The AFS fixes are
useful as Coda/Arla fixes too, and delete seems to be the sort of
thing that could be genericified in a generically useful way.)
The panel is also being rewritten from scratch, although I don't know
for sure that it's planned to be in 2.0. It's in the "vertigo" module
in gnome cvs, I think.
> If we build apps on 1.0, how much will we need to change
> them to work with 2.0, and how many convenience API's will we be
> missing out on?
You almost certainly don't want to develop against the CVS mainline of
gnome-libs or gtk. No one does that actually. Most of the cool new
stuff for GNOME 2.0 is happening in support libraries anyway. You may
find yourself wanting/needing features from bonobo, gdk-pixbuf,
gtkhtml, gnome-vfs, etc. As Havoc says, using them can be painful
because of the frequently-changing interfaces, but it's not
impossible: Evolution and Nautilus both depend on lots of unreleased
libraries, and we're coping. Then again, both projects have lots of
full-time people working on them.
However, nothing forces you to upgrade every day. So you could get a
working snapshot of things, and then develop against that, and let the
mainline interfaces drift, and only sync up once a month or so. And
once 2.0 is released, they'll stabilize. (And 2.0 _will_ be out at the
end of the summer. Too many companies' release schedules depend on it
now. :-)
-- Dan
