Wow, sounds good! Sign me up. :D
Keep us informed. A new (or at least bugfixed) panel would be awesome. On Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:19:32 +0800 PCMan <pcman...@gmail.com> wrote: > Recently there are some discussions about lxpanel on the mailing list, > which is really great. > Hope that we can have a new maintainer for it. > > The original lxpanel, however, is bound to gtk2, xlib, and some > linux-specific stuff. > This makes migration to new technology very difficult. > Much has happened in recent years. > 1. gtk3 replaces gtk2. > The management of window geometry and underlying drawing parts have > radical and backward incompatible changes. > Background image support will be completely broken in gtk3 as many > deprecated APIs are removed from gtk3, especially the pixmap-related ones. > 2. HAL is deprecated and now we have udisks/upower (linux-only), and things > never work for other unix variants. > 3. logout/shutdown should be done with ConsoleKit now. > 4. Xlib is going to be replaced by xcb. > 5. Xorg will sooner or later be replaced by Wayland in some distros > 6. gio and dbus became widely used nowadays. > 7. pulse audio is widely used, and direct ALSA access sometimes causes > problems > > Hence, making old code work with new tech might even be more difficult then > a rewrite. > That's why a rewrite/redesign is planned. > A project without many maintainers should not be trapped in the vicious > cycle of fixing the broken compatibilities again and again. > We have only one way out, reusing existing libraries whenever possible and > trying not to touch too low level stuff. > > Now I mainly focus on finishing pcmanfm 1.0, but previously I already have > a proof-of-concept prototype for lxpanel2. It's now 40% finished. > Here is the spec of the new lxpanel2. > > 1. Mainly written in Vala, and use C when absolutely needed to speed up > developement > 2. Directly based on gtk3 and does not mess with gtk2. Drawing stuff will > be done completely with cairo. > 3. Built with CMake instead of automake (already done) > 4. Use standard widgets whenever possible to get proper accessibility > support (important!!) > 5. Network monitor part is based on libgtop (90% finished) > Libgtop is a nice lightweight library designed for system monitoring. > It works for major systems, not Linux-only. > Even better, it has no gnome dependency. > 6. Pager and task manager part will use libwnck. (80% finished) > With libwnck, we do not touch underlying X11 stuff and can be much more > portable and resistant to future changes of X. > Though it's a gnome lib, it only depends on gtk and has no other gnome > dependencies. > The implementation is quite clean and complete and the APIs are well > documented, making it nice to work with. > 7. Battery monitor will use dbus + UPower. (70% finished) > Glib/gio has built-in dbus support now so no additional deps are > needed. Vala even has dbus integration at the language level. Great! > This may be much better than read from /sys as upower devs will handle > future incompatible changes and provide a constant dbus interface. > 8. IPC stuff will use dbus instead of XSelection hacks. (dbus is quite > common now and glib has built-in support) > 9. The config file might become a single xml file (not sure, still under > evaluation. Ini file based solution is not very handy for tree like data > structure) > 10.The UI might be similar than that of the old lxpanel initially, but in > the future we need to be more unique and won't be Windows-like. > 11.Volume control should be an additional plugin or systray applet instead > of built into the panel. So we won't depend on ALSA by default. > > Instead of reinventing everything in a poor manner, this time I will reuse > existing implementations whenever possible > if they are lightweight enough. This should decrease maintenance load to a > minimum and guarantee tolerance to future changes. > With Vala, coding became much faster than before. To achieve the same > functionality as in C, I felt that only 1/3 of code is needed. > Though the new lxpanel2 will not be available soon, it will be pushed into > repo once I got a first working version. > Of course, this should happen after the file manager 1.0 is done. > > Thanks for your patience. -- Michael Rawson <michaelrawso...@gmail.com> _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~lubuntu-desktop Post to : lubuntu-desktop@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~lubuntu-desktop More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp