Work

Revision 2 as of 2009-04-29 21:12:13

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This page is meant to show all the things that I have started some amount of work on and will finish when they become a priority. Some may be already done, and some may be obsolete

Wiki pages that should be written up

  • OneClickInstall - Should explain the why (link ThirdPartyApt) as well as the specifics of OneClick which, ironically, isn't really one click so much as it's one file.

  • RemovingIA-32-Libs - Basically a long todo list with every package and (hopefully) a list of workers.
  • Apt-p2p-DBUS - apt-p2p should be controllable by D-Bus calls eventually, especially if we get a coherent bandwidth manager

  • Packages-Arch-Specific - Fairly straightforward. We should at least have some explanation of PAS in the wiki, as few even know it exists.

  • Migration-Assistant-Wine - Input is needed to help explore this idea. Which applications are portable, compatible with Wine, worth taking data from, and also not replaced by a free equivalent that we can import that data into?

Other Gnome Tasks

  • Create a (self-killing) "please wait" message for that 12-second or so downtime when Wine is running for the first time. The new notifications feature coming to Jaunty is ideal for this.

  • Bug 111061 - Changing the Gnome theme needs to set the Wine theme properly. Until Wine's theming engine can be perfected, we will likely need to include a Windows version of the various system themes with Ubuntu (likely as just a .theme file within the theme archive). When the system theme is set, the system then needs to tell Wine to use the new theme. Someone (likely me) will also need to make the .theme files for the default system themes in the new release as well, and I will certainly need to make sure they work within Wine.

  • Make it easy to associate a Wine application as a handler for a file type. Currently, this task is so difficult it is nearly impossible. If I want to open .torrent files with Wine-powered uTorrent, for instance, I have to make a special script using winepath just to get things working right on double click.

  • Make autorun work properly for Windows applications. Gnome gives a nice dialog when the user inserts an autorun-equipped CD, but if it points to a windows exe it doesn't always launch it properly with Wine. We also might need some way of having a CD mark itself as "don't run autorun in Linux", perhaps if that CD also carries a Linux port. When I insert an Ubuntu disc, for example, I really don't want to see the prompts to install Windows free versions of software Wink ;)

  • Have a point and click system for mounting virtual CD Images right within the desktop. Essentially, we need to make Right Click->Open with "Archive Mounter" a very easy process that also works with other CD formats, like mdf. If Wine is installed, it should automatically present a standard drive letter (X:\), though this could be changed when multiple CDs are mounted simultaneously.

  • I discussed this a bit at UDS, and will draft a plan soon. "Daemon-tools for Linux" is one way of describing it, except we're doing even better. Some of these just involve fixing libarchive bugs.

  • Have an easy, centralized mechanism for displaying transparent messages. This feature is useful for far more than just Wine, and would be a substantial usability improvement for Gnome -- of course, since it would be done with D-Bus, KDE could handle it too. I'll outline it in a blog post in a bit. UPDATE: This feature was announced as a major coming feature in Jaunty at UDS. Seems someone else had the same idea.

  • Fix up the System->Preferences->Keyboard dialog. It was very difficult for my girlfriend to discover how to add accent marks into English - it's buried in the "other options"->"compose key" setting, and even there we don't tell anyone what the compose key is. Compose key might warrant an entire tab, with illustrations showing how to press/use it. This may merit being a main tab depending on how common this use case is.

Good ideas someone else should code unless I get a lot more time:

  • DNS caching?
  • Update manager and Synaptic should warn if removing ubuntu-desktop (unless kubuntu-desktop is still installed)

  • OneClickInstall - Benjamin Weber of OpenSuSe contacted me regarding this in lieu of 3rd party apt: http://en.opensuse.org/Standards/One_Click_Install

  • JabberAccountCreation - We should make it very easy to create a Jabber account when first starting Pidgin

  • MouseConfiguration - It should be possible to allow disabling of x11's left+right = middle click feature from the Preferences->Mouse panel

    • -- this is harder to fix than a simple bug, since currently this is controlled by the xorg configuration file rather than the desktop environment, and so a new freedesktop.org standard to change it on the fly needs to be drafted and implemented. -- Still, a bug should be filed.

  • UsefulDisksManagerSpec - a spec to beef up the disks manager applet to include error checking and other features

    • -- obsolete since the disks manager has been removed, although it should probably come back in some form (with these features Wink ;) ) In any case, there should be a way to graphically run fsck, mkfs, and the partition manager from the system menu.

Somewhat finished tasks with more work left to do

I have a giant penboard in my room with a todo list on it. It's constantly full, and I never erase things until they're done or at least copied to one of my wiki pages. Sometimes something is done but might require followup; in that case it goes here.

  • (./) .msi files need to be launched with Wine by default (fixed in Wine package, but also depends on shared-mime-info)

  • (./) Spring package is made (but not uploaded to Intrepid)