Re: Screensaver support for the Hurd console

[Marcus Brinkmann]

At Tue, 11 Jan 2005 18:25:41 +0100,
Alfred M Szmidt wrote:
> 
>    > In many ways it is, a user might wish to do things like playing a
>    > specific melody on a bell event, or beep instead of flashing the
>    > screen.
> 
>    Already possible (or possible with minimal changes - not sure if
>    the feature is accessibel through options right now).
> 
> How would you play "Hey sokoły" on a bell event?  Changing the code to
> add the melody doesn't count.

Ah, so that's what you mean with "specific melody".  Well, you have to
write the same code to do that, if you use it with guile or not.

So, you could add to the speaker plugin a configuration option to pass
a melody in some ASCII format and assign that to the bell event (there
are already some such melodies pre-defined in the code).  And then you
could set this either via a command line option, or via the on screen
display configuration manager (to be written), or via a guile function
(to be written).

>    > Maybe adding a mode-line that displays information about the
>    > current VC, adding a way to change events without having to
>    > restart the console, etc etc.
> 
>    An "On Screen Display" which allows information and configuration
>    is something I have always considered from the very start.
> 
> To bring up more points against using guile here, how would you
> configure that "on screen display" on a system basis?

The actual on screen display should be implemented as a plugin.  If
the on screen display actually should be or would be configurable
(what would that mean: "themeable"?), it can be self-configuring in
various ways (command line options, on screen options, etc).

> What about per user?

Per-user configuration of the console is a tricky subject, similar to
the X server.  It's independent of mechanisms of configuration.  We
were talking about mechanisms here, not about policies.

> Or running a bit of code on a screen update to show that you
> have mail?

If you have some sort of a mode-line, its content would be controlled
via plugins.  The rest is policy.

>    > I have already started playing with it, and it won't add
>    > "significant bunch of code" from the looks.  I'd say that the
>    > changes are going to be minimal.
> 
>    It will add libguile, which is significant (up to 500 KB from the
>    looks).
> 
> I thought you meant code that would be added to the console client,
> but in this case I will counter that with: but it needs glibc which is
> about 100MiB from the looks, and all those Hurd libraries,
> and... Well, you get the idea.
 
Actually, no, I don't get it.

Thanks,
Marcus