Re: White background in icons and WM integration

[cehardin]

 On Monday, December 3, 2001, at 11:14  PM, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> On Tuesday, December 4, 2001, at 05:24 AM, cehardin@mac.com wrote:
>
> > This is am issue I'm watching closely.  I'm currently working on a gnustep distyribution called Simply GNUstep which I hope will be as easy to use and as integrated as OpenStep is (using linux kernel).
> >
> > As such, I am looking into and seriously considering the idea of creating a new graphical back-end which is tied to the framebuffer device via the directfb project.  As such, WindowMaker will not be used, and a seperate Dock application will have to be written.
> >
> > If the GNUstep code had direct ties to X11, then this will involve some modification.
>
> The X backend libraries obviously have ties to X ... however, those ties are as small as we can practically
> make them, and the xgps backend should provide a good starting point for any other backend implementation
> (though you would need to mostly rewrite it of course).
> The main gui library is completely independent of the backend used, and should not need any modification
> (in theory).

If I proceeded with the new backend, I would definitely draw upon the xgps sources as a reference.  Just from glancing at the source, I can see that xgps probably used xdps as a reference as well (or vice-versa)


> > Could somebody point me in the right direction as to where this reliance on WMaker resides in the GNUstep source tree?
>
> See core/xgps/Source/SharedX
>
> There isn't really any window maker dependency ... but there is code to make use of window-maker specific
> features, to tell window maker how to behave nicely with the GNUstep app.  This allows window maker to be
> better behaved than other window managers are.

I see, that's great, I was concerned that the dependencies were in the gui library itself.  Thanks!



As a final note, the directfb project marshals the graphical requests from processes in the shared library itelf, not in a separate process.  I honestly don't understand how this can be done (their cvs server is messed up right now so I can't check the source).  Anyhow,, I may need to create a lightweight window manager (just like Mac OS X) if their implementation is not adequate.  

If anybody has not heard of the directfb project, I recommend you check it out at www.directfb.org
It has some really fantastic features, like MMX accelerated alpha-blending ( a good thing to have for gnustep).


Chad