Re: GSoC - Project Idea

[Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com>]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 9:06 PM, Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 8:11 PM, Salomon Sickert <sickert in tum de> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm a student aiming to get place in the GSoC program. While browsing
>> http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas and
>> http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2010/Ideas, I've got following idea:
>>
>> Nautilus, Epiphany, Empathy and other programs, which have the ability
>> to transfer files, could expose the progress of the transfer. This
>> enables other applications to react accordingly and allows to create
>> an unified overview on the progress of file transfers.
>>
>> I've created a first more detailed draft, which can be viewed on
>> http://home.in.tum.de/~sickert/file_transfer_progress
>>
>> Comments and discussion are appreciated.
>>
>> Greetings
>>
>> Salomon Sickert
>
> Hi Simon
> I think this is a good idea. There's a bit more prior art than you
> have listed, hopefully it can make your life a bit easier
>
> There was a project a while back to do exactly what you mentioned,
> named Mathusalem. See http://live.gnome.org/Mathusalem .. I've not
> heard anything about the project for years so I take it that it's
> dead. Not sure if there's any code for it around, or if the originator
> of the project is still around. I think it would be worth chasing it
> up to see how far it got though, I'm sure I remember seeing
> screenshots at some point.
>
> Here's the other thing that might be helpful. Christian Hergert has a
> library called Iris, which is really for multithreaded programming (a
> bit like Twisted for Python apparently) and it basically lets you
> schedule tasks to be run asynchronously. I added some stuff to it
> which lets you set up processes, which are tasks that run on a queue
> of items. This is relevant because I also wrote some code which
> provides a progress monitor dialog for IrisTask and IrisProcess
> objects in a fairly flexible way, using Iris' message passing.
>
> If I was going to write your gsoc project, I'd build on top of this
> work. IrisProgressMonitor is a generic class and it would be fairly
> easy to write something that fires off the progress information over
> DBus to your monitoring application. You could subclass IrisTask to
> make a file transfer class, and a FileTransferProgressMonitor, etc
> etc. (I did write the progress monitor stuff hoping that someone would
> use it to do what you're proposing, although I'm far too lazy to do it
> myself :)
>
> If you're interested, my fork of Iris is here: http://github.com/ssssam/iris
> I sent it to chergert a while ago and he's not merged it, I get the
> impression he is pretty busy, but the library is very solidly coded
> and easy to add stuff to.
>
> Anyway, I'd like to think that this would be a good starting point
> instead of building your own libprogress from scratch. I realise it's
> nicer coding your own lib than someone else's however :) I hope this
> stuff helps, let me know what you think.
>
> Sam
>

Sorry, i have no idea why I started that mail with "hi simon" when it
literally says your actual name right above it :)