For the SHR users that aren't reading the SHR mailing lists i'm forwarding
this message from spaetz:
Betreff: [Shr-User] What's going on in SHR land
Datum: Sonntag 01 November 2009
Von: Sebastian Spaeth <
[hidden email]>
An:
[hidden email],
[hidden email]
Hi all, for those of you few that do not live 24/7 in IRC land, here is
a not-so-brief update on what is happening in SHR land. No, we are not
all dead :).
There are a couple of major transitions that have slowed down new images
or indeed any updates in the SHR feed. Let me try to sum up a few and I
am sure others will chime in and list whatever I have forgotten:
- Transition from the obsolete kdrive-glamo driver to a proper xorg
server infrastructure. This took some time, but it appears that it is
working fine now. Don't expect any (initial) performance boosts, but
being on a regular xorg server and having a driver that is actually
being developed and maintained is a good thing for the future (thanks to
Weiss and others for some really hard work here).
- More fso...d goodness. Rather than having Mickey Lauer's python
prototyped phone backend, we are starting to his re-written bits and
pieces (coded in vala, which should give us a nice performance boost
over python). For the beginning we have the resource handling
(fsoresourced) on board and look forward to the next bits and pieces. I
know very little about the state of things here, so others might have
more information.
-New phone apps: As if that were not enough changes, the core team
(mrmoku, tasn, dos1, and others?) has started to redevelop the frontend
applications for SHR. the old ophonekitd was initially developed by a
guy called quickev who has been missing in action since quite some
months now. Don't ask ME why, but apparently the now design allows for
better/quicker/whatnot development. I'll let one of them speak out for
themselves about the motivations. Besides lots of work,this gives us
also a chance to redesign the screens and make the UI better. So goodbuy
ophonekitd and libphone-efl, welcome phoneui, and libphoneui-shr.
-Bernd Prünzler(spelling?) is kind enough to help out with some theme
development (BTW, you did know there is a theme contest going on, do
you? So, go and design and submit something already!). The default theme
has been designed for powerful desktops, and is using more transparency
and other fancy stuff than the slow graphics can do. He is developing a
theme that should be much faster on the Freerunner (but don't expect
miracles, the hardware will still be barely able to drive a full
VGA-resolution screen). So expect a big fight between dos1 (niebee
theme) and bernd (gry theme) for the fastest performance (while
retaining good looks).
Last but not least: what we had done the last few months, is basically
taking a fork of OpenEmbedded and developing from that. While this gave
us the stability to code apps without having others break our stuff (we
are quite capabable of doing that ourselves it seems :-) ), this led to
a quickly diverging SHR and OE tree. It was decided that we really
should include our stuff into OpenEmbedded proper, rather than just
doing our stuff in parallel. So we had first put all the stuff into an
"SHR/import" git tree which is in the openembedded code repository.
Next, mrmoku created the "shr/merge" tree which is kept in sync with the
OpenEmbedded tree and we ported all our enhancements there. The plan is
to take our bits and pieces from here and merge them into OE over time.
This is where we currently stand, we want to keep using the shr/merge
tree which gives us a current OE tree, but of courseby using more
updated components, lots of stuff was broken. The guys have fought
really hard in the last days (and weeks) to overcome compilation errors,
nonbooting phones, and crashing components. It seems we are now really
close. The new images compile fine (yay!), the phone actually boots, and
many of the crashes have been eliminated. AFAIK, we are currently still
stuck with a segfaulting dbus. As soon as these issues are ironed out,
mrmoku will continue to put updated SHR-unstable images and packages
out. This could take 1,2, or 4 days. I don't know how long and it
depends on how good things will turn out. But there will be a new image
soon. Expect some teething troubles with the new images at first (I am
not sure an opkg upgrade will work), but this is all fancy new stuff
that we are very happy about.
spaetz
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