olpc boot splash

[Peter Robinson]

Hi,

>>>> 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.

Ah, OK, sorry I got the wrong end of the stick then.

>>> 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.

OK. So where the fedora remix logo currently is we replace with
--with-logo so that debian/gentoo/ubuntu or whoever wishes to use it
can substitute appropriate logo?

> 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.

Cool. So we have a default colour if a specific colour isn't defined
by the distro in compile or env vars?

>>> 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.

So we have it so there's a generic placeholder where the Fedora remix
logo is (or maybe nothing if there's not a --with-logo defined?), and
allow the option of background colours, and fallback to the default if
there's none defined?

Peter