Week #1
I started my work on Boxes on June’s 2nd. This first week served as a transition from my examinaton period to the GSoC.
I had some unfinished work from my application period: two bugs to solve.
The first one was #726252 - Refactor topbar’s children into separate classes/modules
The patches were pretty much finished but they were not perfect, all they required was some love. It took me time to transition my mind from the student mindset to a more engineering one, but hopefully, the patches were accepted at the end of the week.
The second one was #692383 - Allow editing of box name in the tite
Just as for the first bug, I had patches ready but not perfect, and they were dependent on work done for the first bug. As it took me time to correct the patches for the first bug, I let this one aside.
My project is to add multi-monitor support to Boxes, so I also took time to read Boxes’ code, especially the App, AppWindow, Display and Machine classes as they seem to be the one I’ll hack the most, and to think about how I can implement multi-monitor support on top of this.
Week #2
I updated my patches for bug #692383 but let them aside to focus on my project.
While discussing the project with several persons like Zeeshan Ali, Christophe Fergeau, Jakub Steiner and Lasse Schuirmann, a problem came up: everybody have a different idea of what “adding multi-monitor support” means.
The main ideas where:
- multiple monitors for one machine
- multiple monitors for one machine only on fullscreen
- multiple machines with one monitor
- multiple machines with multiple monitors
What will finaly be done will be decided by the maintainers and the designers (mainly Zeeshan Ali and Jakub Steiner).
I continued to read Boxes’ code and understand its design.
Currently the Display listen to the App’s state and set the state in response (via a static instance). The App handles the window’s state, wich is not problematic since they both are singleton.
This design works well for a single machine and a single window but is too static for multiple ones, so a deep rewrite may be needed and will take more time.
What needs to be done will be done but don’t expect results soon.