2.6 digressions [was Re: release notes pimping [and some random thoughts on 2.6]]

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Sat, 2003-08-02 at 20:58, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 02, 2003 at 06:10:00PM -0400, Luis Villa wrote: 
> > Not to overshadow 2.4, by the way, but just to get people thinking...
> > 2.6 could really be a really, really awesome release.
> 
> 2.6 is going to be the one where we finally cover every major "must
> have" I think.  With Longhorn and OS X pushing the envelope, of course
> more things will become "must have" ;-)

That's where Medusa comes in, of course. ;) [Something else I forgot to
put on my personal list of 'things that could be really, really cool in
2.6'.]

> And don't forget some of my favorite issues ;-)

>  - preferred applications spec that works cross-desktop
>    (easier if we have cross-desktop IPC system like dbus)

Possibly a dumb question, but if mime stuff works correctly, why do we
need the concept of 'preferred applications' at all?

>  - unify notification icons and applets into a single cross-desktop 
>    embeddable object spec; and allow embedding them in desktop
>    background etc., not just panel

That's really big picture and will require touching a lot of things. I
was hoping to focus my list on things that were more within reach :) 

>  - sanitize prefs menu again, consider adding prefs shell 
>    like XD2 one or something

We could definitely handle this for the 2.6 timeframe. That said, I'm
not sure it's really in the category of 'solid code' that you mentioned
earlier. ;) 

>  - Cairo (was Xr) vector graphics (needs someone to write printing 
>    backend; then we can do really cool stuff).

Isn't this more properly handled at the GTK level?

Luis