User Feedback :: Moving Forward - What's Your Desire?



Quote (roberts @ April 02 2007,11:02)
The only concern that was expressed to me, was that releasing this configuration would likely result in many competing clones based on my tiny core. Many of us recall that we once had such a shadow.

In the Linux world you're always going to have this type of thing, as you know.

If you have a truly tiny core, what is there to really clone? All apps are 'modules' (unc/uci) so the core doesn't have a lot of use unless these apps are available to be attached to it. I'm just talking off the top of my head here.

I'm thinking the core is only what it takes to boot Knoppix and all of your Lua magic. Some of that may even be able to be modularized. With this approach you have tight control over the core and maybe some base extensions then the community carries the weight of developing all the other app extensions, just like what happened when Mydsl first emerged.

In this scenario, you could still have a "DSL Classic", if people wanted, where any innovations like new lua scripts could be backported to "Classic" whenever possible.

Actually, as you make updates you could backport them to "DSL Classic" by packaging them into uci/unc. That would keep people from having to d/l the whole 50mb cd again for most updates.

Just brainstorming here. RS you are an innovator so I will trust your direction.

Chris
A thought that just now re-occured to me, and something i was  playing with several months ago, is the possibility of modifying myDSL in such a way that it is not tied to the window manager, that is it doesn't create a fluxbox menu item which is then converted to a jwm menu item. I haven't worked out a solution that would make a menu item still useable, but I think if it could be done it would make things more convenient both for a tiny DSL core and for those users who want to add or remove window managers. Currently the user still needs .fluxbox/mydsl.menu (i think) even if he's remastered DSL without Fluxbox, and having a generic (non-wm-specific) menu *might* make it easier to include the mydsl menu into an arbitrary window manager.

The main problem with this, apart from the time and effort to modify mydsl, is the existence of a fluxbox-specific menu item in most of the existing extensions. A workable option, though, might be to keep the current fluxbox syntax in the extensions and simply check for the existence of a mydsl.menu file before writing the menu item. Maybe this check is already being done, though.

In any case, it's something to think about if this tiny DSL core is actually put into play at some point. Making DSL easier to strip down will likely result in more people stripping it down =o)
Mik,

So something like a menu.lua that makes the menu OS independent? That's an interesting option. Then you really could get down to a core where even the WM's are optional but you can still build menus.

With flexibility comes complexity. :)

Chris
Mikshaw:
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I haven't worked out a solution that would make a menu item still useable, but I think if it could be done it would make things more convenient both for a tiny DSL core and for those users who want to add or remove window managers. Currently the user still needs .fluxbox/mydsl.menu...

Free desktop standards (XDG) require a centralized XML file from which every compliant window manager can adopt (via "include") the entries in that file. It's just a matter of centralizing menu entries for MyDSL extensions to one file that can be included across the board by adding one entry to the menu of whatever window manager a user chooses. During my search I found a link about how Puppy has already transitioned to do this (second link). It would affect DSL (and be implemented) similarly.
http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-latest.html
http://puppyos.net/blog....-002857
clivesay:
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With flexibility comes complexity.

With standardization, though, comes uniformity, ease, and utility. :cool:
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