[Portland] Summarize current plan?

[Lubos Lunak]

On Sunday 12 March 2006 17:19, Jeremy White wrote:
> I downloaded the source and played with it for a bit,
> and also drilled into it a bit just using the ViewCVS
> interface.
>
> I think it could use some documentation love before
> John ships his current email.

 Well, if it's going to be published only in April it may as well risk being a 
bit obsolete by then.

> Specifically, the entire dapi module is largely unmotivated,
> and I think a STATUS or README should be added to the
> dapi/ directory asap.  (I know that the high level README just points
> to the Wiki, but afaict, the Wiki has no doco on dapi
> itself).

 If you read in archives all recent threads started by me you'll see the 
history of it. In short, what's in CVS is what I quickly hacked together 
because people only were talking all the time about doing things but nobody 
actually seemed to be doing anything. The mails have some details but writing 
extensive documentation on something like this didn't seem worth bothering 
(and I suck at writing docs anyway). The plan is of course that there will be 
eventually docs as needed, as soon as they move high enough in somebody's 
todo list.

> And what I was hoping could go into that document
> were the answers to the following questions that I have:
>
>   1.  What is the dapi?
>
>   2.  Am I meant to bundle it with my app, or
>       do I expect to find it already installed on
>       a Linux distro?

 You link the lib and expect to find the daemon already installed (either by 
the distro, part of the desktop, explicitly installed by the user, whatever). 
For the case when the daemon is not installed you can also ship a fallback 
daemon. That's the plan for now.

>   3.  How do I link to and invoke the API?
>
>       (I could find no header prototype of Init
>       in any .h file; took me a minute to find
>       lib/.libs/libdapi.a.  A simple foo.c
>       that invoked dapi_Init() seg faulted).

 What's in CVS is not quite yet ready for actual usage, 'make install' doesn't 
work because of some technical reasons and so on. You can check out what's in 
test/ to see the basic usage though. I think I wrote a short howto for 
running the testapps in one of my mails.

>   4.  What is here, and where is it going?
>
>       I think it is vital to say somewhere really
>       quickly and early that this is an experimental
>       prototype and lots *will* change and that
>       much more will come.


 I expect to have a version Really Soon Now(TM) that I will want people to try 
out to actually see how it works in practice. There's already doc/API.txt 
with generic API description, I'll add also some C-bindings specific notes 
probably together with some howto-install-and-use. Something more needed (for 
now)?

 Oh, and while you'll be at reading doc/API.txt it'd be nice if you could have  
a look at 
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/portland/2006-March/000171.html and 
comments on the API calls. So far comments from ISVs have been pretty much 
next to none and I actually have only pretty vague ideas on what specific 
functionality would be needed.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
---------------------------------------------------------------------
SuSE CR, s.r.o.  e-mail: l.lunak at suse.cz , l.lunak at kde.org
Drahobejlova 27  tel: +420 2 9654 2373
190 00 Praha 9   fax: +420 2 9654 2374
Czech Republic   http://www.suse.cz/