Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 11:53:24 +0100 From: Dean Lombardo <dlombardo@excite.com> To: John Birrell <jb@cimlogic.com.au> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Adding desktop support Message-ID: <37298BA4.1AC52CDE@excite.com> References: <199904280647.QAA26783@cimlogic.com.au>
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John Birrell wrote: > > I'm working on an application that is targeted at users who, based on > their exposure to a certain commercial OS, expect to be able to point > and clip their way through life, and to recognise things by little > pictures. There are a few things that I'd like to add to FreeBSD to > support this sort of application. The first is to build icon pixmaps > into each executable program. > > Now that we've made the transition to ELF, adding an XPM formatted pixmap > to a program is simply a matter of: > > objcopy --add-section=.icon=file.xpm file I think that embedding additional information into ELF executables is a very good idea, although I'm not sure that icons are one of the things you want to see embedded in this way. Anyway, are icons *really* that useful in recognising a particular program amongst a large number of executables? It's ok if the number of icons is small, and the icons themselves are relatively large (e.g. icons on a Windows desktop), but the tiny little icons in Windows Explorer I find totally useless. On the other hand, it would be very helpful if executables contained one-line descriptions of what they do (à la pkg/COMMENT - or even pkg/DESCR in ports) - these could be put into .comment and .descr sections respectively. A file manager could then display this one-line information alongside each executable (and, optionally, you could request a more detailed description). As quite a few people already mentioned, icons only make sense for executables in /usr/X11R6/bin; descriptions make sense for all programs, command-line driven or not. There are a lot of programs for which man pages do not exist, and which have manual pages installed in various places, such as /usr/local/share(/doc), /usr/X11R6/share(/doc) - these often come in different formats - txt, html, pdf, ps, etc - which sometimes makes it non-trivial to find a description of a program. Also, while different users of the same program may want to assign different icons to it, they definitely wouldn't want to have different descriptions of it! A "FreeBSD File Manager" (well done, John!) that could describe what each program does would certainly be worthwhile, and people used to point-and-clicking will find it a lot easier to use than other file managers. Having said that, I don't really object to having icons inside executables *as well* - it certainly wouldn't hurt anyone - disk space is not a problem these days; but if icons are to be embedded into programs, perhaps all command-line programs, such as rm or ls, should have a generic "command-line" icon (similar to Windows' MSDOS icon for Win32 console apps), to prevent people from clicking on it. It would also make a lot of sense if the file manager was distributed as part of the system. If this "little feature" can help FreeBSD gain the support of more users, this is the way to go. UNIX was once command-line-driven, but things have changed since then, and modern UNIX desktop systems have to become user-friendlier if they are to compete with Microsoft. Dean To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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