Re: GNOME and the GUI

[Erik Walthinsen <omega@omegacs.net>]

> Any volunteers to try E on a skimpy 386 or 486?
I have a 486/33 in the basement that I can compile it on and try it out.  
However, just to make things worse, I have no monitor for that machine.  
That means that I must display it on either my 1280x1024 B&W Xterminal or 
my 800x600x16b laptop, *over the net*.  Shall be interesting...

> The gnome project includes a window manager, scwm, at this time.  It's
> based on twm, I believe, and is still alpha.
What I think may happen is that Enl's config mechanism and Gtk's may merge. 
IMO, if Raster is working on both projects, this seems quite logical.  That 
way, themes could be constructed that not only change the WM, but the 
widgets used by the apps.  The system could change from one *complete* look 
to another just like that.  If certain hooks could be added, one might even 
change the theme *live*.  Taken one more level, imagine a system with apps 
running, cranking away, and someone changes themes: the screen could morph 
from one to another, as all visual entities are objects and can move 
themselves around.  The ultimate Windoze killer (for the graphically 
oriented customer).  *NOT* for SEUL-1.0.

> > Clearly, we'd be foolish to lock ourselves into a single toolkit.  Though
> > Gtk has great power and still-greater potential, any sytem which can't
> > run Tk applications is IMNSHO broken.
I've heard of a patch for tcl/tk that will bind it to Gtk.  Now that 
would be *very* cool.  I may do that on my box at work, once I start using 
exmh there...  (config there is dual-P6/133 w/o monitor and a 1280x1024x8b 
Xterminal).

> Agreed.  But for now we are talking about what is going to be a part of
> the base of SEUL.  Other WM's for the "power user" will be included in
> optional packages, which is way down the road at this point.
This is where the package manager's virtual package features come into 
play.  Ideally, all window managers would provide the "window-manager" 
virtual package (as I believe all Debian-compiled wm's do already).  Since 
you can have multiple packages providing this capability, you then have to 
make sure that all your other environment pieces work with it.  If we can 
guarantee that all the wm's provided with SEUL are compatible with all the 
apps, etc. provided by SEUL, then we've done our job.

> It wil be some time before the main GUI is set in stone.  We will most
> likely change our minds on several aspects of it many times before it is
> set in stone.  Even then it may change from the first release to the
> second.  That's what these discussions are all about.
Well, I think we've pretty much decided on GNOME (by way of association), 
but what we *must* do now is to understand the GNOME project, what it 
provides, what it doesn't, where they're going, and where we want them to 
go.  Only if we're involved can we get what we need.

     Erik Walthinsen <omega@seul.org> - SEUL Project system architect
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