Re: [Fresco-devel] Questions about Fresco

Daniel Carrera <[email protected]> wrote:
> - When will 'normal people' be able to start using Fresco?
> I know you can't give me a precise schedule, but you can probably tell me 
> if it's in the order of 5 months or 5 years.

I guess it's more in the years than in the month range. The architecture
in mostly in place (but might change of course;-) but *LOTS* of features
are still missing.

A more exact estimate is not possible: We are all volunteering our work.
The more people help, the sooner you can get it! We could use some more
developers and some web-people, too. The website is stealing a lot of
time from some of our developers...

> - How hard will it be to port current apps to Fresco?
> At the very least I figure we have to port OpenOffice, Gtk+ and Qt.  Is 
> that doable?

That heavily depends on the application: A port can be very easy if
there's a clean separation of GUI and logic and impossible otherwise.

There was some talk on writting libraries that wrap QT or GTK and turn
the relevant functions there into requests to Fresco. I can't say how
feastable that is, it won't be easy I assume. It should be possible
though.

A Xlib-wrapper should definitly be possible though, running an Xserver
inside a Fresco-window has allready been demonstrated. So there will be
some way to use X applications. Don't expect to see something in that
direction soon: We expect things to change and don't want to keep
updating something like an X wrapper that has no real use for now.

> - Will it be possible to run X and Fresco at the same time? (like the way 
> MacOS X ca run Aqua and X).  This would facilitate the trancision to 
> Fresco.

You can run Fresco in X even today: We use SDL or GGI for the actual
graphic-access. Both libraries work fine inside and outside of X
(actually the drivers when running in X are better). If "better"
graphics libraries become available we'll just suppoort those as well.

It's just a "desktop in a window", but it works. We might improve that
once we think that Fresco is of any use to users.

-- 
Gruss,
Tobias

------------------------------------------------------------
Tobias Hunger           The box said: 'Windows 95 or better'
[email protected]                      So I installed Linux.
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