Re: Python based capplet

[Soeren Sandmann <sandmann daimi au dk>]

Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org> writes:

> On Sat, 2007-11-10 at 11:46 +0100, Sebastian Heinlein wrote:
> > Hello Rodrigo,
> > 
> > As you perhaps already have read in my previous mail I am working on the
> > display configuration tool that is currently shipped in Ubuntu.
> > 
> > I don't know what the plans of Fedora currently are, but would you
> > accept a configuration tool that is based on Python in
> > gnome-control-center at all?
> > 
> I really don't find any problem with that, provided, of course, that the
> python part is optional, so that people don't have to have python if
> they don't want to.
> 
> Apart from that, if the performance of the capplet is ok, I've got
> nothing against it
> 
> Anyone has anything against it?

Monitor configuration is an area I am planning to work on for 2.22 as
well.

The important thing to figure out is what the user experience is going
to be like. Bryan has created some mockups here:

   http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/designs/monitor-resolution-settings/

An important aspect of this is that when you plug in something that we
have seen before, that something is automatically configured to
whatever it was set to last time. My plan is to do this by computing
some sort of monitor identifier based on the EDID information and
storing that in a file on the disk.

Also part of this is changes to gtk+, metacity, and the panel to make
them react properly to monitors appearing and disappearing. I have put
up some material here:

        http://www.gnome.org/~ssp/randr

Not particularly well-structured, but some people may find the TODO
file interesting.

This can all be done using just RandR - no root priviledges or
xorg.conf-editing would be required. I understand that the Ubuntu tool
would also include functionality to do this. I am not opposed to
having this in the gnomecc capplet, but it needs to be done with a
separate "Advanced" button, so that Fedora and other distributions can
hook up their own xorg.conf-editing X configuration tool for it.

For Fedora this tool would be system-config-display. In the longer
term, xorg.conf will hopefully become gradually more and more
irrelevant as the X server becomes more dynamically configurable.

As for C vs Python - it's not terribly important to me. I suspect that
writing this panel in C would be faster for me since then I wouldn't
need to create RandR python bindings, and since parsing EDID and
interacting with RandR.


Soren