Sunday, September 21, 2008

New naming scheme

As a product of few requests and a longer discussion on forum (small part was on ede-devel, but looks like the web interface is not refreshed yet), EDE will soon addopt a new naming scheme for applications.

At first sight it looks pretty GNOME-ish, but it is for the reason. Or maybe there are more than a single reason :)

All our applications started with "e" denoting part of EDE (in the KDE style). It was fine until you install applications starting with "e" too, like applications from Enlightenment folks. And you suddenly get: eiconman, edewm, eet... a pretty confusing list where you don't know what is what and what belongs to whom. If you want to reuse all the beauty of the shell completion using "e" as the starting character... things becomes pretty messy.

Adding to this confusing names inherited from 1.x version, this new naming scheme comes as rescue.

Let say you do "ps -ef" to list all the processes and just to check what is eating you memory or cpu, and suddenly you see something like "eiconman". "What the hell is eiconman?", I'm hearing already. Sounds like "superman". Actually it sounds like everything except "desktop" (as desktop with icons in your background).

Yes, "eiconman" is short name of "icon manager" (omitting "e") but icon manager is very broad name and the first thing it associates me is some daemon that manages all visible icons on all opened applications, no matter was that FLTK or Qt or GTK+.

Now, you replace it with "ede-desktop" and things becoms much better. When you see it in that "ps" list, you definitely don't want to kill it or, when it crashed, you'll know how to start it (if you decided to go little bit deeper and help us ;)).

As Ralf commented, shell completion comes free in this case. Of course, there is other side of all this goodness: things could become too verbose, like "ede-do-this-do-that-daemon" and will not be pleasant to type without some shell help. But, you can't have everything.

So things will be keept much more flexible than consistent; e.g. "efiler" sounds better that boring "ede-file-manager" or "evoke" is much more practical than "ede-session-holder-app-starter-and-shutdown-manager".

Btw. things are not changed on the repo yet; hopefully, I will change that during the next few days.

1 comment:

icon manager said...

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