olpc boot splash

[Peter Robinson]

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.

If that's the case you need to have published docs how to build
packages that can link against the core plymouth to make it easy to
build against.

> 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).

How would that work for things like Fedora remixes where there would
well be two logos like in the olpc demo (although the remix logo might
not be used as it might not be Fedora).

> 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.

Well that wouldn't work really great with the XO as the OpenFirmware
goes through to to the bootanim so right from power on through to GUI
is the one colour, a bit like the Macs. I would have thought a single
colour would be the simplest of all options.

> 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:

I disagree as there's already debXO and most of the OLPC stuff in
ubuntu as well so it could easily be used by 3 different distros, and
the OLPC Server project which could/would also use it wants to
eventually be based off CentOS rather than Fedora.

> 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).

Unfortunately I don't know enough about the architecture of plymouth
to be able to comment on the implementation.

Peter