[Xquartz-dev] Google Summer of Code 2010 Project

[Jeremy Huddleston]

Hi Marcelo,

Thanks for contacting us.  XQuartz itself does not participate in the GSoC, but Xorg does.  I'd certainly be willing to mentor you in this process through the Xorg GSoC.

First of all, check out http://wiki.x.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas for the application process.  I think you have taken on quite a number of goals which might not all be possible to tackle in a single summer.  I would love to chat with you sometime to get a sense of your background and what you might be able to accomplish during the summer.

Using quartz-wm to better interface between OSX and X11 has been a longstanding goal, but it has been difficult to tackle because we've mainly been playing catchup to get our DDX working on master (finally achieved that at this past XDC) and playing wack-a-mole on issues that have been cropping up.

Right now, the two biggest sore-spots (IMO) are still GLX and copy/paste.  Both of these are leaps and bounds better than they were in the 2.2.x days (and so much more so than what shipped with Leopard), but there are still major issues that need to be addressed in both of those subsystems.

COMPOSITE, EXA, RandR, and increased WM functionality in quartz-wm are probably the four biggest blank-slate projects that we have.  The Quartz EXA driver is probably the easiest to implement of those three.  Supporting COMPOSITE would certainly be the most challenging.

The windows are actually native windows, but not NSWindows.  They should resize and move using Universal Access... if they don't, can you tell me how to test that (I don't have much experience with Universal Access other than my research into getting the window title reported).

The separate dock icon is probably the most difficult to handle.  I've given some thought to this, and it comes down to this:

1) Each icon in the corresponds to a different process.
2) quartz-wm would need to act like a gnome/kde/xfce taskbar for X
   * I don't know this protocol myself, but it should be on X.org

quartz-wm would probably need to fork itself to create a new process which registers with the Dock for each X11 taskbar icon:
  When that forked process is killed, it would need to xkill the client.
  When that forked process is activated through the Dock, it would need to force X11 to become the active app and then move its associated window to the front.

The down side is this could result in a ton of icons (one per xterm), so you could do grouping where you let similar processes correspond to one forked quartz-wm-taskbar-manager process.

I'm not sure a good task-bar manager to look at for example code.  I think the big three (Gnome, XFCE, and KDE) are all GPL, right?

Anyways, that's probably a bit more detail than you need right now.
Let me know if you have time to chat 1-on-1 about this sometime this coming week.

Thanks,
Jeremy


On Mar 25, 2010, at 21:02, Marcelo Galvão Póvoa wrote:

> Hello, I'm a student interested in participating in GSoC 2010 and I
> would like to submit an idea for a coding project to X.org. I've already
> suggested it on their mailing list but I don't know yet if it is feasible
> because of technical difficulties or proprietary source code issues
> with Apple.
> 
> My project would concern in providing a better Mac OS and X server
> integration in some key user-oriented aspects such as:
> - Separate every application window in its own dock icon and make it
> fully featured, including drag and drop files, exposé, etc.
> - Transform X windows into "native" windows, so they accept features
> such resize and move using Universal Access and dragging content into
> it.
> - Provide smoother scrolling via mouse/trackpad.
> - Maybe some other nice features :)
> 
> This would benefit mostly users of GTK or wine applications like me.
> 
> I don't know about X11 implementation. Does someone know if it a
> reasonable project?
> 
> Any comment will be appreciated.
> 
> Regards,
> -- 
> Marcelo Galvão Póvoa
> _______________________________________________
> Xquartz-dev mailing list
> Xquartz-dev at lists.macosforge.org
> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/xquartz-dev

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