[Cs22800] E17 correspondence digest

[Stephen Dranger]

Here's a digest of our correspondence with various people involved in 
the project:
---------------------
Our first e-mail to Rasterman (e17 project founder) and his response:

Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:

Greetings,
> 
> I am a 4th-year student at the University of Chicago and am 
> participating in a class called "Free Software Practicum." The goal of 
> this course is to work on a project related to free software and have it 
> become a part of the community. It is being supervised by Michael 
> O'Donnell (odonnell at cs.uchicago.edu), a faculty here in the Computer 
> Science division. Ziba Scott (zrscott at uchicago.edu) and myself are 
> currently looking for a project to work on for this course, and 
> Enlightenment looks very interesting. We are looking for a project 
> dealing with visual elements: openGL, GUI, etc., and both are quite 
> interested in working on Enlightenment. We have the resources of the CS 
> department available as well as the other students in the course. The 
> course lasts for 10 weeks, although if necessary we can extend the 
> project beyond this quarter. Could you give us information on projects 
> for Enlightenment that might be suitable for this project?

Ok (funny - I find myself in chicago airport at the moment...). Been busy. Had
project deadline October 4 for work then I was in Tokyo for a week of business
meetings, and I barely can come back and catch up and now find myself in
Illinois speaking @ Reflections | Projections in Champaign.

Anyway. I'm catching up on my mail now. Well starting.

You may have noticed E17's source itself hasn't advanced much for many months.
That's because all the work is going into:

1. separating out core functionality that may be useful elsewhere and turning it
into libraries.
2. working on these libraries so they are fully fledged, clean and complete.

and so no work is being done on E 0.17 itself.

I have earmarked a bunch of things to be done, but that will likely see very
little in terms of visible and usable results in a WM, BUT will build the basis
for making it very easy to do so.

1. Evas. I'm talking about this today @ Reflections | Projections. I've been
busy rewriting the internals and cleaning up the API. It's almost all complete
now, just minus documentation.
2. Ecore. This needs a cleanup. Primarily API-related. It's not really a
consistent API and misses some features. But it is useful and saves a lot of
work by wrapping X calls and making them simpler to use.
3. Ebits. This needs a rewrite. I've written a library specifically to help do
this: Eet. This lib is basically complete for our needs. Ebits needs a complete
overhaul and rewrite and re-think. I've termed this Ebits2.
4. Eet. This library handles:
  File reading/writing for multiple data elements in one file.
  Compression of data elements in a file
  Saving and loading of image data to and from these eet files.
  Serialising and de-serialising of data structures for saving and loading and
    for transferring across the wire.
5. EWL. The E widget layer. This after recent discussion seems to be maybe
merging with Ebits2 and might both be spun off on their own project together.
6. Efsd. The E filing system daemon. This is basically complete and does its
job, but could do with using DNOTIFY in linux 2.4 and up instead of requiring
FAM. This will be the basis for file management under E 0.17 and beyond.
7. E itself. This has been split too:
  E the WM. The window manager for window management and the central point of
    communication.
  E the desktop. This is the desktop manager and handles your desktop(s)
    background and any activity on it on each virtual desktop.
  Epplets. This would be small applications that live on the desktop or in small
    windows around the screen to do useful things.
  E taskbars/panel. This would do... what it says. Nothing has been done on
    design etc. here yet.

The problem with a lot of work on E itself is that it would be better to fix the
base subsystems and libraries first, and perhaps turn a lot of even E itself
into shared libraries - for example put into ecore so apps can set
hints/properties the same way through easy to use API calls etc.

Anyway. give you any ideas?

---------------------------------

Our post to E 17 developer's list:
From: Ziba Scott <zrscott at uc...>
* e17 taskbar framework* 
<http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=2292944>  
2002-10-17 13:48

 Hello,
    Stephen Dranger and I (Ziba Scott) are fourth-year undergrads taking 
 part in a Computer Science class at the University of Chicago. The goal 
 of the class is to develop free software for the Linux community. We 
 would like very much to contribute to the development of e17.    
     A survey of the HEAD and SPLIT cvs code, as well as of the 
 developers list has lead us to believe that a taskbar is both desirable 
 and not actively being worked on.  Discussions from last March seemed to 
 be mired in stylistic debate.  In an earlier posting, Rasterman informed 
 a hopeful taskbar creator that "e17 doesn't make it easy" and "ecore has 
 the nuts and bolts - but right now e17 doesn't advertise info to make it 
 easy for you."
    Therefore, we would like to begin work NOT primarily on a taskbar, 
 but on preparing e17 so that the creation of any number of stylistically 
 varied taskbars would be almost trivial.  In otherwords, to see that e17 
 DOES make it easy for hopeful taskbar creators by using the modularity 
 that e17 provides.
    We would be vary grateful for responses to our proposed project 
 concerning its value to e17 or other general suggestions.  Apologies to 
 any e17 developers whose toes we may be unwittingly stepping on.
 
 Ziba Scott
    zrscott at uc...
 Stephen Dranger
    stdrange at uc... 
 

-----------------------------
A response from Ibukun Olumuyiwa

[ahem] Do we really want a taskbar for E17 at all? I don't have any
ideas at the moment, but I'm thinking there might be more creative
alternatives that do not take up valuable screen estate (we already have
the iconbar).


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