Providing a default graphical environment on FreeBSD

[Mike Meyer]

Lorenzo Cogotti <miciamail at hotmail.it> wrote:
>Il 17/09/2012 20:32, Garrett Cooper ha scritto:
>> *gathers breath for really tangential/OT rant*
>>
>> <joking>
>> Sounds like we have someone volunteering to write a chapter in the
>> handbook and do some X11 development to make Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LXDE,
>> Fluxbox, [...], or etc work better on FreeBSD!
>> </joking>
>If I proposed it, is because I'm willing to offer my help implementing
>my idea if it gets attention :-)

You requested that this work be done. Then you did it again in several places, the first one being here:

>My only objective is estabilishing a standard, just saying "you want to
>make a GUI application for FreeBSD? You are asking yourself what
>desktop
>environment will work for sure on FreeBSD? There you have it, Blah DE
>works just well and is perfectly documented."

Without someone actually *doing the work* of making sure that SunDEW or whatever works well and is perfectly documented, then declaring "Our preferred DE is SunDEW" is pointless. Being willing to help is all well and good, but until there's someone taking point that you can help, it won't do any good.

Personally, I don't think FreeBSD needs this. It'd be nice to have, but it's not critical, since most FreeeBSD systems run without an X server at all, and many of what's left just need enough support to run a terminal emulator, clock and browser.

>- You want to use FreeBSD official environment?
>Good, you'll get official utilities for FreeBSD and you are ensured a
>certain amount of support and stability from your system, since that's
>the official environment.

And who's going to write these? Just declaring a standard won't make them magically appear, and won't make developers who prefer something else suddenly start writing for the standard.

>- You are a developer wanting to build some FreeBSD desktop utilities?
>Unless you want to specifically target your utility to a desktop
>environment, you have documentation, guidelines and support for the
>official desktop environment. You are also able to interact with the
>rest of the desktop (for example creating a GUI configuration editor, a
>taskbar icon or simply stream a sound). You can also communicate with
>other official desktop utilities, since (official utilities) are all
>targeted for this environment, you can, for example, create a
>partitioning tool and other utilities can communicate with it nicely
>(because it is well documented and easy to find out).

As above.

>So I can't see how bad this is, it simply looks as a nice to have
>standard to me, exactly like POSIX, even if UNIX has the bazaar
>philosophy, you still offer POSIX compatibility and X server as sane
>defaults.

It's not a bad thing. It's just pointless until there's someone willing to do the work to make it happen. Since it's always going to be in ports (because it will require X or similar), the previously suggested path of working with the PCBSD people (who actually want to support a desktop environment) to develop it and then get it integrated into ports is a good one.

-- 
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