Before stating my personal preferences on the roadmap, one thing about the changes we introduce:
If we substitute programs, we should preserve protocols and file formats, even if they are far from optimal (but we can add another protocol in parallel if it's convenient). This is to try to not produce a maintenance nightmare (programs should stay compatible with new versions of the iliad os).
So, now my proposal:
milestone 1: preliminaries - document the needed file formats and proocols prior to changing anything
. The protols I would like to have are:- iliad_einkfb (dev/fb0) protocol
- erdm protocol
- eripc protocol (that includes matchbox-panel and busy led???)
- scribbles file format
- have a way to create firmwares for the iliad and to flash them (and also to restore original 2.12 version)
milestone 2: minor usability improvements- Substitute displaymgr wit xepdmgr, but having xepdmgr (a) understand erdm protocol in addition to his own protocol and (b) make sure that it can still be used as a wrapper for ported programs so they also work with 2.12.
- Enhance contentlister with the "low hanging fruit" tickets (number of elements displayed, ...).
milestone 3: boot time; goal: 10 seconds- investigate the following possible paths (apply the ones that yield results):
- scrap the systemV rc.d-style init and doing a more embedded approach: just a script launched from inittab that loads the modules we need and start the xserver and the shell (contentlister)
- scrap even init (hence also inittab) and load a sh as process 0, that does the same as the previous entry
- change the panel and contentlister so they use a smaller and faster loading toolkit (or none , and using prerendered font to avoid messing with freetype)
With that I would be happy enough for a 1.0 version (ups, 2.13, that is
).
Next in the list (for subsequent versions) would be start making a reality the UIs dicussed in the UI discussion thread
