olpc boot splash

[Ray Strode]

Hey,

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you know what the policy is for getting plymouth plugins upstream?
> or do we keep it as a separate thing?
I've kind of flipped-flopped over whether all plugins should go
upstream in the past.  In many ways it makes a lot of sense for
plugins to go upstream, since the plugin API isn't stable, the project
isn't that big, etc.  On the other hand, we don't want plymouth
tarball releases to get too huge either.

We do want to make sure that the plugins are generally useful though.
I guess what I'm saying is, I think we want plugins upstream that
aren't very distro specific.

The way we get around the distro-specific problem currently is we have
configure options  --with-logo , --with-background-color etc.  By
default these values are a made up "bizcom" logo and a gray color, but
Fedora, for instance, sets the logo to the fedora logo and the
background to blue.  Plugins source these values to figure out what to
show.  This way the "fade-in" plugin shows bizcom fading in and out by
default, but on Fedora it shows the fedora logo fading in and out
(likewise for the other plugins).

The configure options solution isn't great, though.  What if your
background is a gradient instead of a solid color? We solved that
problem by adding --with-background-color-start/end-color-stop
options.  Clearly, though adding more and more configure options
doesn't scale.

This came to a head when the "glow" plugin landed recently.  It has
many different frames all showing variations of the logo, or frames
based on the shape of the logo.  --with-logo just isn't enough.  That
plugin punts on the issue.  It just ignores what's passed to
configure, ships it's own frames and expects distros to clean up the
mess in their packaging.

The OLPC plugin seems to have the same sort of problem.  It has an XO
logo and a fedora logo in it.  Also it has an arrow based on the XO
logo.  We can't really upstream those things, because they're not
useful outside of olpc/fedora .  So some things we could do:

Add a new configure option --with-small-logo. By default it would be
the upside-down copyright symbol we use in the glow plugin.  you guys
would change it to be the XO man.  For --with-logo you would use your
remix png file.

We could then fix the glow plugin to use the small-logo file too.  It
would need to add it's glow programatically instead of using frames.

Alternatively, we could make glow continue using frames, but have some
control config file so things like the olpc boot splash could be made
by changing the file (we should probably rename it from "glow" to
something more fitting then though).

--Ray