Re: CDE - Common Desktop Environment

[Jelle Hermsen <jelle%jellehermsen.nl@localhost>]

On Sep 30, 2012, at 1:53 AM, Moritz Wilhelmy wrote:

> First off, sorry for the delayed reply.
> 
> I'm working on it. Is anyone else? Currently, it does not build yet,
> which is why it isn't in wip, but I'd like to know if anyone else is
> working on it.
> 
> Moritz


Neat that you're also working on it. This makes it a good idea to coordinate a 
bit to prevent duplication of effort. I suggest you join the CDE mailing list 
on Sourceforge  so we can split up the work.

The current status:
My patches for fixing ToolTalk got into the main repo and Thomas Klausner added 
me to the list of pkgsrc-wip developers. I've got a preliminary pkgsrc-package 
that I'm building and testing against and when it builds properly I can add it 
to wip. In the meantime I'm sending all the patches I generate there straight 
to the CDE mailing list where stuff is committed quickly by Jon Trulson (who's 
doing an amazing job).

At the moment I've got an hourly cronjob set up that pulls in the latest code 
from git and compresses it, which I subsequently refer to in the pkgsrc pkg. 
When I get the pkgsrc-pkg building and all the necessary patches got into the 
repo, I will ask the project leaders to release a new source tar.gz on SF so we 
can refer to that and commit to wip. From that point on we can put our patches 
straight into wip and send them to the mailing list at the same time, so we can 
remove them from wip again when the tar.gz on sourceforge updates (the pkgsrc 
circle of life and a nice reference to Elton John :-) )

Anyway, right now I'm preparing a bunch of patches (on 30 files or so ) that 
adds NetBSD compatibility across the board. Instead of checking for the 
__NetBSD__ identifier and creating a horrible mess and duplicating a lot of 
effort when working on other BSD's we agreed to check for CSRG_BASED. So right 
now I've made a list of files that mention __FreeBSD__ but not NetBSD and I'm 
almost done changing those to CSRG_BASED where ever this is appropriate and 
otherwise using other solutions. They prefer to use HaveSomething macro's (and 
rightly so) and that's the way I added support for statvfs to ToolTalk.

Given the current situation on FreeBSD and OpenBSD I think it won't take much 
time to get things building, but having a stable release will take longer, 
especially regarding the current situation on 64 bit. Thankfully there's quite 
an active community and some people are putting in incredible amounts of time 
fixing things.

The thing on my to-do list after this basic NetBSD compatibility is done is to 
look at the installer and use the work that has been done on FreeBSD there, or 
to quote Marcin Cieslak from the CDE mailing list:
> We might think about sharing installer bits (currently in
> cde/admin/IntegTools/post_install/freebsd) that could certainly apply to
> other BSDs (given how similar inetd or /etc/rc.d/* are).


And then I will also look at fixing stuff for DragonFlyBSD (my main OS), but by 
then this shouldn't be too hard.

I would love to see you on the CDE mailing list so we can share our work.

Cheers,
Jelle