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Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

iczelia.net

141–150 of 193 posts

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#141
post #30

> Sadly, the hang was deterministic: Huh, someone's in it for the thrill of the hunt, I see...

I wonder about the sadly . Luckily the hang was deterministic.

I think the author meant that she was just trying to work on her slides, and was hoping that by quitting/restarting, the bug would temporarily go away, so she could continue working on what she actually wanted to work on, and not go down a debugging rabbit hole.

Certainly the determinism made it easier to fix, but the determinism also meant that she had to stop what she was doing and fix it right now, which is... "sadly".

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#142
post #18
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember how cool I thought raster was with his vaio and everything. This was the future! Transparent eterms and tasteful backgrounds everywhere.

I remember fondly of a raster talk at FOSDEM about 20 years ago: playing videos inside a terminal. Amazing!

Wow, I think I remember that talk, too. And I remember thinking, "why would anyone want to run a video inside a terminal?!" I still don't want to do that, but it was cool that enabling that feature only required a few lines of code, since EFL(?) already supported it, was already linked in, and the code to start it was minimal.

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#143
post #103

"Sadly, the hang was deterministic" No, no, you rejoice, a deterministic bug is the best sort of bug. because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed. The sad bugs are the ones you can't find a test case for. I also got a bittersweet chuckle out of how the author considers it a lightweight environment, I mean, they are not wrong, but think of how far we have fallen when e, the ultimate bl…

The author is 21 (which I find incredibly impressive) and is using a DE that was written when they were a baby. It _is_ lightweight in that context. I also love the fact that XaoS knowledge is useful in the context of "real software" programming!

As someone who remembers E making the rounds among the BSD and Linux users in my college dorm when it first came out, there's no way he's only 21 if he was a baby in the late '90s.

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#144
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots (compared to Win XP or even earlier ones)? I love desktop environments that look nice, I love effects and animations, if done well, and I love to be able to customize things (KDE/Plasma is doing a really good job in that regard imho). But Enlighenment? Whenever some screenshots excited me, I gave it another try for some hours, and then went back to K…

> Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots Yea, this was my memory of it, too. I remember installing it, and making a theme that looked all "elite" and cool. I added an anime character desktop background, as was required at the time. Took a few screenshots, basked in how cool I was, and then just switched back to whatever I was using before (I think Gnome).

It worked, at least 25+ years ago when I last used it; early versions weren't a model of stability, but that wasn't nearly as important as an X server or a Wayland compositor not crashing, since you can simply restart an X window manager when it crashes (from a terminal window, virtual terminal, automatically from a script, etc.).

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#146
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the time I had no idea it resembled NeXTStep, but it was great. I used (and still use) Window Maker for almost a decade before learning what NeXTSTEP actually was (i heard about the name occasionally but never looked into it), then for several years before even trying one. I remember having a heavy sense of uncanny valley because the thing in front of me looked almost exactly like what i was using for years but…

On the topic of lookalikes, remember good old fvwm95 ?

Yeah, although I very much prefered the orginal fvwm.

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#147
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or whatever the tycat thingy understands You're missing the point, which is that the EFL library just has media playback built into it - for a lot of different formats. Like Carsten mentioned, tycat doesn't do anything special, it just emits the right escape sequences to tell the terminal "display file X". And then terminology just says "hey media library, give me a player for file X". tycat doesn't need to know or…

> You're missing the point, which is that the EFL library just has media playback built into it - for a lot of different formats. As far as I understand, you're missing the point. Every format that someone now wants to handle on terminal, needs to be supported by the EFL library?! Does it support LO spreadsheets? PDFs? Audacity projects? Raw camera images? HTML? Yes? And now I want to switch away from LO to some very…

I don't understand your arguments.

Whatever desktop environment you're referring to probably uses some of the same underlying third-party libraries for file format support as EFL, so what's the difference?

Why would being able to display graphical elements in my terminal program only be useful if it were supported on the Linux virtual console or some other terminal program I don't use?

Why would you expect "the same folks" to stop working on projects they find interesting or useful in favor of fixing your problems with entirely different applications?

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#148
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What changes have been implemented in GTK that make it harder to use outside of a GNOME environment?

practically everything in GTK 4. It removed menu bars ffs

As far as I can tell, every major version of GTK should be thought of as an entirely separate project, and nothing in GTK 4 made GTK 3 or GTK 2 harder to use.

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#149
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows As screens get larger, the amount of pixels you need to push to composite windows gets larger-squared. It makes sense to move the pixel pushing away from the CPU and more importantly away from CPU-RAM and on to a separate RAM bus. The "single buffer with invalidation" model of Win16 (I cannot remember how it works in X) saves memory at…

> The "single buffer with invalidation" model of Win16 (I cannot remember how it works in X) Same way, they both come from Macintosh (which, if i remember the apocrypha correctly, was Bill Atkinson's idea based on what he thought Xerox Smalltalk was doing even if it turned out it wasn't working like that).

You remember correctly:

https://www.folklore.org/On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.html

https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html

Re: Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is 21 (which I find incredibly impressive) and is using a DE that was written when they were a baby. It _is_ lightweight in that context. I also love the fact that XaoS knowledge is useful in the context of "real software" programming!

As someone who remembers E making the rounds among the BSD and Linux users in my college dorm when it first came out, there's no way he's only 21 if he was a baby in the late '90s.

From her "Short CV"

"Hello! I’m Kamila Szewczyk (iczelia). I am 21 years old. I’m an expert programmer and aspiring mathematician, primarily interested in compiler construction, data compression, esoteric languages, statistics and numerical algorithms. ... Currently I am a full-time student based in Germany." [1]

And the start of the post:

"The editor in chief of this blog was born in 2004. She uses the 1997 window manager, Enlightenment E16, daily."

[1] https://iczelia.net/cv/

edit: added the [1] at the end of the first quote

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