Re: Helix Player virtual team meeting



Hello folks,

As the clarifications on the licensing issues are happening in other threads, I also wanted to discuss some of the other interesting things that came out of the virtual team kickoff.

The first has to do with our use of the gtk_hxplayer prefix for our GtkWidget-based wrapper around the helix client.

There have been suggestions, from Hadess and Havoc in particular, that we not use the gtk prefix with our widget, as it implies that we are part of the gtk namespace, and hence under the control of the gtk project.

This makes sense to me.

At the same time, I feel that it is too hard for your average gtk developer to drop a video widget into his or her application.

Gtk has a number of complex widgets -- GtkCalendar, GtkGammaCurve, and even non-bundled projects like GtkDataBox. Why not some sort of first class gtk-prefixed base video widget?

Can we come up with something that makes a video widget as easy and natural to use as a calendar widget?

Another topic I'd like to bring up is our build system, ribosome. I think that ribosome's starting to get a reputation for being more confusing than it actually is.

Ribosome is very similar to the autotools in many ways. It has:
- A tool similar to jhbuild called "build" that is used to solve dependancies, check out source code, set profiles of #defines, generate makefiles, and run a build

- A tool similar to automake called "umake" that generates Makefiles from Umakefil's (instead of Makefile.am's). Umakefil's are written in python instead of m4.

Ribosome is written in python, and integrates into development environments across the many platforms we support. It's definitely worth checking out.

Ribosome can also be automated -- One of the best kept secrets of helix are our source tarballs, available through http://forms.helixcommunity.org/helixdnaclient/. These are really simple to build -- just untar, type make, and you're done.

If you still don't like ribosome, we have also experimented with mixed autotools-ribosome projects with our gtk example player. If you like this sort of thing, by all means send your thoughts out to the dev player helixcommunity org mailing list.

We always enjoy hearing from you on the dev player helixcommunity org list, and listen closely to what you have to say. Hope to see you there!

--
Ryan Gammon
rgammon real com
Developer for Helix Player
https://player.helixcommunity.org





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