[gold-devel] Here we go, folks

[Boris Buegling]

Folks,

here it finally is!

On 3/3/07, Justin Hibbits <jrh29 at alumni.cwru.edu> wrote:
> - How does the system start up?

LSD -> authd -> init -> login interface (probably graphical) and all
other daemons

> - How does a user session work?

On login, the user should be able to load the last state of your work
environment, both in terms of where windows are, as well as their
actual content. Of course, it should also be possible to not load/save
state if the user desires. In addition to that, it might be nice to
optionally have multiple saved sessions to choose from, work,
browsing, presentation, ...

> - What do we provide to users to get their work done?

The user in me wants a bunch of things fixed, which current Unices do
wrong (most of these points have been discussed before in #gold at
some point, but I'll still mention all of them):

Some actions which require root privileges should be doable by users:
bind()ing to ports <1024, changing your own copy of /etc/hosts
(~/.hosts maybe), authentication of users (if the user wants to
provide some personalized service to all other users of the system)
and mounting filesystems.

It should be possible to change the user context of a process at
runtime, e.g. if you edit some file which is owned by root in a text
editor, authenticate as root to authd before writing.

Better code re-use, the functionality of every tool should be
available as a component to other applications. For example, the grep
tool of a possible POSIX layer or its Gold-ish equivalent would be a
mere interface to a text-search component, not just a monolithic
application which everybody has to reinvent continuously.

Non-hierachical view of the filesystem. OSX has this partially done
with Spotlight, but as Adam says, it is not done right. There's also
Beagle and the Windows Index Service, which both do it in the same
way. In Gold, there should be a global search daemon, which is
notified if any file changes. Another disadvantage of the hierachical
view of the FS is Unix' 'everything in one basket' way of installing
software, OSX' framework directories are a much better way of
organization and enable the user to install multiple versions of the
same package.  In addition to that, the user should be enabled to add
his own metadata, much in the sense of tagging files.

A functionality similar in function to kio_slaves, so that any object
can be anywhere in the network, accessible by any protocol.

Now to some other points:

The GUI should both be very configurable and provide sane defaults,
probably offering to mimic one of the current major offerings, so that
the user feels at home. One good example of a functional, yet usable
GUI is the 360's dashboard (not to be confused with the OSX thing of
the same name). It even comes with a OSX dashboard like mini-interface
which can be opened at any time. Any eye-candy should be optional for
both performance and usability reasons.

Re Adam's comment on tabbing in WMs, the ion2 WM does have that, we
might look into that to see if this idea is feasible.

Centralized configuration: MS' bad implementation of this concept
should not keep us from using it. In addition to that, users are used
to launching some kind of 'control center' to configure lots of
things, and they should be able to do that in Gold, too, if they want
to.

In addition to having command interfaces for every application and
having consistent default behaviour and keybindings, it should be easy
to edit keybindings for everything in a consistent manner (this still
is an issue on all OSes/GUIs right now).

As jbit was already talking about Golem having a 'normal' and a
web-app server, there might be a server which displays a GUI in an
ncurses-like way for those who prefer a texty UI (there were projects
doing that for Gtk+ and XUL already).

In addition to caching objects obtained via the network, it should be
possible to sync a whole bunch of objects at the user's request (e.g.
transfering all your work environment to a mobile device which has no
or only partial network connectivity).

Gold's web-browser should have Python scripting support instead of JavaScript.


That's all I can think of, right now.

Regards,
- neocool