olpc boot splash

[Ray Strode]

Hi,

>> 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.
Note I'm not saying that the OLPC plugin should be built out of
tree--quite the opposite.  The point of the mail was to discuss ways
to intergrate it.

>> 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).

So what I was saying is we already have --with-logo.  This gets turned into

PLYMOUTH_LOGO_FILE

which can be referenced in the code.  We can add --with-small-logo, or
--with-emblem or whatever, too.

This way, you have one distro defined logo for the center of the
screen, and one distro defined logo for the corner.

>> 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.
There's no problem with using a solid color background.  Different
plugins do different things, for plugins that do a solid background
there's

--with-background-color

which gets turned into

PLYMOUTH_BACKGROUND_COLOR

out of the box it's gray, on fedora it's blue, in ubuntu it's orange
(or whatever).  The point is to provide a way for the splash to adapt
itself to the distro.  Of course, you can ignore
PLYMOUTH_BACKGROUND_COLOR and just use black, white, or whatever, if
that's what the splash calls for.

>> 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.
My point here is, the plugin has an image in it that shows a fedora
logo.  If we upstream that, then when it's running centos it will show
a fedora logo...  We need to make it work in such a way that we aren't
shipping distro specific (and trademarked) logos in the upstream
tarball.

Basically, from an upstream point of view, we want to be as friendly
as we can to distros/integrators as possible.

--Ray