Providing a default graphical environment on FreeBSD

[Lorenzo Cogotti]

Il 17/09/2012 18:20, Tom Evans ha scritto:
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 5:00 PM, Zhihao Yuan <lichray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I definitely agree with this. Sun has a book, "UNIX Essentials
>> featuring the Solaris...", and GUI takes a big part in the book. A
>> default GUI is essential to a modern UNIX. FreeBSD can no longer
>> regard GUI as a third-party bonus.
> This is according to *your* use cases though. There are many of us who
> do not put X - or any graphical environment - on our FreeBSD servers.
>
> If FreeBSD did not regard a GUI as an optional 3rd party component,
> that would mean bringing Xorg, and a specified default WM into base -
> potentially even dbus and hald as well. IMO that would be a waste of
> time and resources, as both Xorg and most WM have rapid development
> changes - just look at how many issues are brought up on x11@ when
> there are new upgrades of Xorg available.
>
> As well as this, Xorg versions would have to remain relatively stable
> during minor releases, meaning if you DO want X11, then you are being
> hamstrung by requiring it in base.
>
> Status quo for me please.
>
> Cheers
>
> Tom
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I don't have in mind of pulling X in the default FreeBSD installation,
I'd rather keep that requirement away. Although I don't understand
what's the problem with having X stable between releases and having an
official, supported FreeBSD GUI environment, so that when a developer
tries to figure out which API he/she needs to deal with on this system,
documentation and examples are immediately available, as long as he/she
follows the guidelines, it will work perfectly with FreeBSD and
integrate with the default GUI.

I don't see this as "forcing a default GUI and making FreeBSD a
graphical OS", I see this as estabilishing a standard for developers who
want to develop GUI applications on FreeBSD, supporting features as
panel integration, reliable messageboxes and other trivial things, on
other operating systems, that are apparently unavailable on UNIX without
pulling in significant portions of lots of environments.

X server is a good standard for low level GUIs, like a single window
(and even with that you'll have a hard time adding fullscreen support,
copy to clipboard support and other apparently trivial tasks), but try
to implement some advanced application with it, it just isn't enough to
keep development time affordable, so let's say we want to provide an
official GUI for a BSD tool, what will it use, GTK+, Qt, pure X server?

If FreeBSD states "CDE is the official supported desktop", any BSD
application will use it, if KDE4 is chosen, then a KDE GUI is provided
and so on, no ambiguity, consistency and no additional dependency is
involved, just a clear standard.

I can't see how this could bother FreeBSD philosophy or servers in any way.

The only objective is introducing a standard for GUI application
development that FreeBSD projects could rely on to deliver not only text
based applications, but also desktop applications, and a FreeBSD
specific automounter could be a good example.

-- 
Lorenzo Cogotti