README ====== PerlPanel is an attempt to build a useable, lean panel program (like GNOME's gnome-panel and KDE's Kicker) in Perl, using Gtk2. There are several reasons for this: 1. I really enjoy programming with Gtk+ and Perl. It's neat. 2. Using a popular language like Perl lowers the barrier to entry, so a lot more people can contribute. 3. It makes C purists go a funny shade of purple. 4. Because there's nothing like it at the moment. 5. Perl's built-in garbage collection and optimisation means that it may well perform better on low-end systems than similar programs. A few tenets: 1. Everything is OO. 2. GNOME rocks, but not everyone likes or can use GNOME. So we avoid using it and stick to pure Gtk[1]. 3. Sane defaults. Not everyone wants a CPU/eth meter by default. 4. Everything (apart from these tenets) is subject to debate. If something is broken in the panel/applet/config systems, then we can fix it. I can't imagine a normal user will want to use PerlPanel for a long time, so breaking compatability between versions is no problem. A few wahs, or, TODO: 1. Support for multiheaded systems - there is a way to kludge this but a "proper" solution is more desirable. 2. One day, all applets will be widgets in their own right, and will inherit from a base class that will let us do neat things like having standard pop-ups. Maybe the Panel will also be a widget as well. 3. Translations are incomplete. 4. There is some sort of race in autohide mode - if the pointer hits a particular pixel, the panel flashes on and off very quickly. [1]: We use the Gnome2::Wnck library for the launch feedback, tasklist, show desktop button and pager, and Gnome2::VFS for various other stuff. However these modules don't require the rest of the Gnome2 modules - they're just named that way because they're maintained by the GNOME developers. -- $Id: README,v 1.16 2004/11/07 20:01:45 jodrell Exp $