Frist Post

First post with my spiffy new XPS m1530.  I’ve just gotten E up and running, and it looks quite nice.  Anyways, I’ve got just under a week to get ready and packed before I head off to start university.

code_swarm EFL

Heres another, with all of the EFL in HD glory,  so its hopefully better quality.  Its more of a time-waster than anything, although I suppose for people newer to the project it shows in nicely animated fashion whos worked on what and for how long.

code_swarm

Noticed this a couple days ago, decided to give it a try.  It results in a pretty neat video, and shows how many people really have commited to EWL.  Music from here, and you can find more about code_swarm here.

Update: Switched video to Vimeo, as it is better quality.  Full-sized video.

ECDB Fun

So I’ve got back to working on ECDB a bit again, and I’ve scrapped my previous EWL-only interface for a nice as-much-edje-as-possible interface.  At the moment I’m thinking that all of the filelist and tree-related widgets will be EWL, and the rest edje.  As a comparison between old (unfinished) and new (even more unfinished), here you go:

EWL Only:

Old interface

New, with edje:

(link)

Anyways, I like the look of the new version better.  Now just to find that odd EWL infinite loop.

Tiring

I figured that now would be a good time to talk about what I’ve seen going on in the Enlightenment project.  I haven’t been around the project for that long (< 1 year), so maybe some of my views are naive, but I’ve found a lot of the stuff pretty frusterating.

First:  The license discussions.  The whole thing is frusterating, and the from what I can tell, there are only a couple people who feel strongly positive.  We first have a guy who in my entire time with the project has only written massive novels to the mailing and never actually contributed code, and then a guy who is speaking from the viewpoint of company.  From the viewpoint of a company, I would have thought that BSD would be more free and preferable to the LGPL.  And, while its nice that you are giving back, what other companies are doing doesn’t affect you in the slightest.  The solution to this has been proposed several times by the cooler heads, and that is just to drop it.  All projects under the Enlightenment umbrella should be under the same license, and as we’ve seen, relicensing is impossible.  So too bad, you missed your chance, wait until we do another E17ish complete rewrite.  Until then, you are wasting time.

Second: Lack of new developers.  As one of the only (I think) new developers that have joined the project as a hobby, I believe that this gives me a somewhat different perspective than others around.  The first main problem is the oft-mentioned code duplication.  The easiest examples are the 3 different widget libraries around (EWL, ETK, e_widgets), and maybe a new 4th coming in with the GSOC projects.  Another problem that I feel is the confusion over where we are heading next.  Whenever I start to look into improving or hacking libraries other than EWL, there is soon another discussion on the mailing list about a completely new idea/way of doing things.  I realize that this sort of development is necessary, but it is fucking intimidating to jump in totally fresh and contribute.  It never seems to settle down enough to do some small changes/fixes/whatever without all of your work being planned to be rewritten/removed.  I don’t even have an idea how to improve this, as talking about it/better community interaction seem to have failed up to this point.  Maybe we just need an impartial moderator/dictator to keep things slightly saner.

Third: People.  I’ve never really been a people person, or that actively involved with the community, which is good and bad.  Its good because I think I’ve managed to stay fairly impartial, but its bad because I don’t know any of the participants as well as I should.  Lately we seem to have become way to entrenched in our views, and it is showing.  From my point of view, the entire project is done FOR FUN.  People like Toma, who come in and stay positive and try new things are the ones we need to keep in mind when dealing with each other.  In not just my opinion, this project has become too focused on politics and other crap that draws us away from the real point of the project: to have fun making cool stuff. Thats the beauty of open source and coding, not worrying about our code getting stolen or trying to outshine everyone else with your own separate implementation of the same thing.

Anyways, there’s my view on the past little bits events.  I guess I’ll just ride this out, and see what things look like after the changes go down.  Also, I’d like to say a sorry goodbye to Dan Sinclair (dj2), who has done some good work for the project.

On a slightly more positive note, its nice to see more Enlightenment-specific stuff on Planet E thanks Luchezar Petkov (Manowarrior), Terrance Hutchinson, and Tom Haste.