Re: GSoC participant

[Hubert Chathi]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:22:46 +0200, Riccardo <address@hidden> said:

> On 2008-04-23 02:39:16 +0200 Hubert Chathi <address@hidden> wrote:

> - fixing window focusing issues
> That will be very appreciated, since even the live CD is plagued by
> them! That doesn't make a good impression
I really hope that I can fix some.  They seem to be complicated issues,
but can very annoying.  The first step is collecting reports of what
issues are present, so at some point, I'll be sending a message to the
list requesting more information.

>> - System Tray
> What do you mean by that? GNUstep has no system tray...
The idea would be an implementation of the Cocoa NSStatusItem API using
freedesktop.org's system tray specification.  So if you create a
NSStatusItem (which on MacOS X shows up on the right side of the menu
bar), it will show up on your system tray, if you have one.  I don't
know if this is a good idea, or if it's even doable.  It's just an
initial thought, which I will be hashing out at some point with Fred.

(Étoilé has menulets for their menu bar, which I think are implemented
completely differently.)

>> Just a bit about myself: I've been involved with GNUstep since 2005,
>> and became the main maintainer for the Debian packages of the GNUstep
>> core libraries (don't blame me for the funny filesystem layout.  We
>> were forced to follow the FHS).  And I've been involved with free
>> software
> That's a hot point... I wonder who and why decided, but it surely out
> of the GSOC scope.

It's part of the Debian policy.  It makes sense from Debian's point of
view to follow the same layout as the other GNU/Linux distributions.
But it causes problems when you're trying to emulate a different system,
like GNUstep does.  Ideally, FHS would be changed to allow GNUstep's
hierarchy.

I'd like to at some point build an alternate set of packages that use
the GNUstep filesystem layout.  It shouldn't be too hard -- IIRC, it
just involves changing a variable in the debian/rules file in the
gnustep-make package.  But it requires a lot of time, since you need to
rebuild every GNUstep package.  And there are some improvements that
could be made.  Maybe I'll do that this summer, since I'll be staring at
GNUstep stuff for large chunks of time...

Hubert