I asked in #winehq where I should ask about this, and I was sent here. So no flames if they were horribly wrong, I tried ;) I'm an undergraduate CS student, and I've been reading the wine newsletter for a while now because I find the project rather cool to watch. When I started using Linux a year ago wine didn't run my screenwriting software at all -- it's now fully functional. That's just flippin' sweet :) So, naturally, I'm excited at the idea of maybe hacking on wine. I'm not a super experienced C programmer. I know Standard C but have never actually worked on a large project in it before. I pick up new languages rather quickly though, and I've worked in Java, C, C++, Matlab, Lisp, and Python (my current favorite). But because I'm not a low level C guru (yet), I looked for things I could contribute to that weren't frightening -- some of the suggestions on the Wiki summer of code page look like they're meant for people already familiar with the wine codebase. That said, I'm interested in picking up the desktop integration areas that wine currently lacks. Working trash, my documents, autorun, xdg menu support (adding start menu items to the K-menu for instance), winebrowser, and icon themes. Basically a good chunk of stuff on the fun projects page. Two questions: 1. My understanding is the mentor organizations get to choose who they want. Is the wine project still interested in someone with my relatively low C/wine code base experience or should I just look elsewhere? 2. Is this something feasible for a proposal? Could it realistically be completed over the summer, say with 10 (insert your realistic number here) hours a week of work? You guys know the code better than I do :)
On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 19:26:07 +0000, Joseph Garvin wrote:
1. My understanding is the mentor organizations get to choose who they want. Is the wine project still interested in someone with my relatively low C/wine code base experience or should I just look elsewhere?
Well, we're not the borg but yes we're interested in anybody who seems competent and dedicated. Based on a totally random and mostly unjustified first impression, I'd say you are!
2. Is this something feasible for a proposal? Could it realistically be completed over the summer, say with 10 (insert your realistic number here) hours a week of work? You guys know the code better than I do :)
You named a lot of stuff there, but yes desktop integration is absolutely pitched at about the right level. If it helps any, when I started I didn't even know C, I learned it specifically in order to hack on Wine. So it's definitely do-able, especially as documentation improved a lot since I started (well, I would say that, I wrote quite a bit ... :) In order of difficulty from easy to hard I'd say: - Linking Desktop/My Documents to the real locations - XDG menu support - Autorun (needs the Wine explorer work really) - Icon themes Icon themes listed as "quite hard" because directly importing icon themes from the environment is fraught with non-code problems like visual consistency. I have a patch to import the GNOME artwork which IMHO makes a *ton* of difference, it looks much nicer, but Alexandre wants yellow folders ;) But to do that I had to Gimp the icons up a bit, they weren't usable raw. Autorun needs integration with the HAL to monitor for new media events, really. And that needs a process sitting in the background, which is what the Wine Explorer thing is supposed to be. I have a patch to add that but AJ said at WineConf it needed more design work. XDG menu support is totally do-able, though be prepared for frustration as you hit random bugs in desktops and distros even if you only target XDG. Linking Desktop/My Documents to the real locations shouldn't be too hard ... in theory .... thanks -mike
On 6/2/05, Mike Hearn <mh(a)codeweavers.com> wrote: [snip]
- Linking Desktop/My Documents to the real locations - XDG menu support - Autorun (needs the Wine explorer work really) - Icon themes [snip]
thanks -mike
I could help out with the xdg menu stuff. Not with coding, but with working around bugs and such. -- Travis Watkins http://www.realistanew.com
participants (4)
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Ivan Leo Puoti -
Joseph Garvin -
Mike Hearn -
Travis Watkins