(no subject)

[Matthew Berg <wdomburg pce net>]

Jason Nordwick wrote:
> 
> >Session and shutdown are already taken care of in gnome-libs.  And
> >package management is taken care of by the distribution.
> 
> That is the central point, basically.  You can't rely on the package tools
> to take care of inserting/removing entries/associations/etc, because Gnome
> is supposed to be platform independant.  I was trying to find a way to get
> them entered outside of the package manager.  

*nods* Though simply having the entry added to /usr/share/apps gets done
as part of the install/uninstall process sort of takes care of that. 
But in some cases, I could technically see someone not wanting it to be
in the main system menus.  In which case I would like to see the menu
configuration become a little more intelligent that a straight rundown
of entries in that heirarchy.

> Of course, as you state, all the information would be kept in some resource 
> file, but initially querying the application would be necessary to find out 
> what to do.  I more I talk to people, though, the better I think it would
> just be to add the ability to the native packaging system, instead of trying
> to work around it in a platform independant manner. If we only go for BSD 
> and Linux support (I mean all Free operating systems) then  we shouldn't 
> have that much to code and support.  On all the BSDs it would relatively easy
> since they share a common package management system, on Linux you would have
> to do it for each distribution.

Hrmm, as one who has to regularly deal with multiple platforms (where I
work we deal with SCO, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, and now AIX and Digital
Unix) it bothers me to only support the major packaging mechanisms.  

I look at the idea much as I do the kernel's file system abstraction
layer - it's a bit more of a hassle, but it provides flexability.
 
> >The idea being that this would allow a replacement of the modules in
> >order to make it look and feel however you want, without the need to go
> >window manager hopping like people do now.
> 
> Look at Scwm.  Everything is implemented in loadable modules with a small
> core.  All the modules are programmed in Guile (Scheme) and run-time
> loadable.  I think that E also support loading like this, but compiled and
> linked at execute time.
> 
> They should just combine Scwm and E.  That would be the ultimate in looks
> and extensiblity.  I would die to see this happen.

The problem is, I don't know Scheme, and don't really feel like learning
it right now.

What would be ideal is providing things like scheme extensibility into
the module, rather than the core of the program.

Matthew Berg