My slides from my Jackfield and Python talk at Pycon UK are available.
A few people have started hassling me to provide packages for Jackfield, my port of Apple’s Dashboard to Linux, so people can more easily try it out. What do you think, gentle reader? I’ve got very little time to work on Jackfield at the moment, and I felt that a better use of my time would be to try and make it run more Dashboard widgets, rather than to make the installation process easier — my thought was that the ease-of-installation process is critically important, but it’s critically important to users, and Jackfield isn’t meant to have users yet because it’s not close enough to being ready. Tell me what you think: should there be Debian packages, Ubuntu packages, Fedora RPMs? The point was made that there’s a lack of contributions from other people precisely because it’s too hard to install, and I found that a relatively compelling argument. So, let me know what you think in the comments.
I think you shouldn’t spend in getting packages for various distributions. There is a lot of people in each distro community which will be happy to take care of that.
I suggest you just do tarball releases from time to time and ecosystem will take care of bringing them to users (with bug reports as a reward, as always ;)
Posted by Frederic Crozat on September 9th, 2007.
I second that. Providing a tarball would surely increase the responses from develpoers/testers/users.
But if you already have a tarball you could also quickly transform it into a .deb package (via checkinstall), so you’d get many reports by making use of the huge Debian and Ubuntu communities.
Posted by hypnotoad on September 9th, 2007.
It will be nice if you could use Distutils’ setup.py to perform any installation. Distributions (and even mere mortals) can take it from there.
Just found out about Jackfield from Planet GNOME — awesome stuff, thanks!
Posted by Michel S. on September 9th, 2007.
i third the tarball comment. let MOTU etc take care of actual packaging for each community :)
Posted by gnudoc on September 9th, 2007.
The codebase sux (don’t get me wrong it’s a nice PoC). ;)
You should rather redesign the system and perhaps layer Jackfield over stuff like screenlets or gdesklets.
Posted by retrogamer on September 9th, 2007.
I think tarballs are the best idea, and as people have said the distros communitys will make the packages
Posted by McScruff on September 9th, 2007.
Another vote here for a tarball.
Posted by Jon on September 9th, 2007.
I think a tarball would be a good idea. If you make a .deb at this point, it wouldn’t be that great of help for developers I don’t think, but as the project matures, I would expect a .deb package to be available and added to the repositories… I also wouldn’t be too ashamed to publicly post your need/want for some assistance in developing this project somewhere where people will see it. I would recommend places like Digg.com, Compiz/Compiz Fusion Forums, and of course here.
Thanks,
Posted by BrokenCrystal on September 10th, 2007.
I also wanted to point out the reason I am attracted to Jackfield over limited projects like Screenlets, is the ability to run widgets from any platform. It would be nice to take my favorite yahoo! widgets and mix them with apple’s widgets and even some from M$! Keep up the good work. I hope everything works out. Don’t get me wrong… I like Screenlets. Right now, it’s the best we have available for Linux in my opinion… I like the idea of Jackfield because I believe it could be better!
Posted by BrokenCrystal on September 10th, 2007.
I’m saying this because I’m not really sure, but how hard can it be to make a package for two of the most popular distros? At least debs and RPMs should be provided, that would suffice for the major distros and cover a lot of ground. I’d like to try this out but I have no knowledge of running this application as it is.
Posted by Gumjo on September 11th, 2007.
Ping me as and when for a Fedora RPM Aq but couldn’t agree more with Michel S. – setup.py makes it really simple for packaging (qv. Jokosher)
Posted by Snecklifter on September 11th, 2007.
i would love to see some deb files for this! i can’t wait to use it, regardless of how well it works
Posted by Christophski on September 14th, 2007.
Tarball at the least. .deb would be nice also. But
Tarball at the least. Please.
Thanks.
Posted by noah on September 19th, 2007.
+1 tarball
BTW: wouldn’t it be easier to make ta transparent browser using webkit/gtk+ to serve as a layer to widgets??
Posted by Davim on September 20th, 2007.
Davim: yes, it would, for Dashboard widgets. It wouldn’t for Opera widgets, though, and more importantly webkit/gtk is not for ordinary people until it’s packaged for distributions, which at the moment it isn’t. Also: no Python bindings as yet afaik. I’ll seriously consider webkit later, though.
Posted by sil on September 21st, 2007.
I’d say keep focusing on your code, and let someone else take care of packaging. However, on the flip side of that is the possibility that taking the time to make a couple packages could make your project more well known, thus bringing in additional coders and these mystical packagers they may not know about your project currently…so it’s a double edged sword. I’d still say focus on the code at this point probably…
As to some of the other comments I’ve read, it may be in your best interest to turn this project into a library/plugin for something like gDesklets, to simply allow widgets from other platforms to run on top of it (or another existing desklet platform)…? Really, it’s all up to you, but I do agree there’s no need in reinventing the wheel if your main goal is for some other, more specific component. Plus, from what I understand an upcoming version of gDesklets is supposed to be going more multiplatform…ie, it runs on Windows and Mac OS as well as Linux/Unix. Lots to think about I guess…
Good Luck! :)
Posted by Derick on September 24th, 2007.
I was wondering if you had been contacted or are currently working with this guy? He seems to have figured out google gadgets and is talking on his blog/livejournal about helping you out with Jackfield.
http://cgwalters.livejournal.com/
If you get any time, can we get an update on the current status of Jackfield? What is working so far? What are you having problems with? What is not working? Anything… Throw us a bone! I am very anxious. ;- )
Thanks and keep up the good work,
Posted by BrokenCrystal on October 23rd, 2007.
I just wanted to chime in and say don’t worry about packaging – focus on developing, and let someone else do the packaging if they want to. I can compile the code, it is a lot more difficult to write someone else’s code. Keep up the good work, with the Widgets Layer plugin in Compiz-Fusion (which comes with Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10), you don’t have to worry about integrating it – you can just magically do it without any extra work on your part. So basically, you can have it be all dashboard-y without having to do anything extra. It’s pretty sweet.
Posted by Joel on October 25th, 2007.
Another vote for tarball…
Posted by Knoeki on November 1st, 2007.
Another vote for a tarball. At the same time, if you submit a ticket to bugs.gentoo.org requesting an ebuild and linking to the site, they will put that into the bucket of would-be packages waiting for some enterprising geek to come along and decide to make the install script (ebuild) for it.
Tocano
Posted by Tocano on November 2nd, 2007.
I don’t mean to be a bug, but I was wondering if you have an approximate ETA on a release date for a working version of Jackfield? Example: (2Q-2008) Second quarter of 2008. <- Wishful thinking! No pressure…
Thanks,
Posted by BrokenCrystal on December 9th, 2007.
BrokenCrystal: I have no time whatsoever to work on Jackfield. If someone wants to take over from me then that’d be good; failing that, it’ll be done when I get some time, if ever. Sorry.
Posted by sil on December 10th, 2007.
screenlets is now supporting apple widgets -> http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=7513&page=5
some jackfield code is being used :) maybe you could give them an hand :)
Posted by Luis Davim on March 17th, 2008.