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EFL 1.0 Is Finally Released
Lisandro writes "The Enlightenment crew has finally released the first version of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which the E17 desktop is built on."
Adds reader mu22le:
"Among the Enlightenment libraries hitting version 1.0 are Eina (core data structure), Eet (data encode/decode and storage), Evas (canvas and scenegraph rendering ), Ecore (core mainloop, display abstraction and utility), Embryo (small virtual machine and compiler), Edie (GUI layout and animation), E_Dbus, Efreet (handling of freedesktop.org standards), and Eeze (udev wrapping)."
Getting it right can take a while -- a preview of the EFL libraries first appeared in 2004. Enlightenment has never stopped looking cool.
Some time ago there were hints & speculations that Samsung bada mobile OS might use some Enlightenment libraries. Considering how future Samsung Star-like handsets might shift to bada from "feature phone" flavor of Touchwiz UI (it's already quite close), how primarily such handsets represent recent touchscreen boom (except for very few atypical but highly visible and vocal places) - millions of people might perhaps carry at all times part of Enlightenment with them quite soon...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I would like to see a thorough review of EFL, with good descriptions and screenshots, before I download and install them on anything.
As a linux enthusiast, user and eye-candy lover what could i do with this? honest question, is this the core to build enlightment?
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
E17, which depends on these libraries, has been out for...how many years now? It's in wide use, and even has a specialized distro or two based on it. These may be v1.0 libraries, but that by no means indicates that they're "the first version". That's as silly a claim as the notion that v1.9 should be followed by v2.0 rather than by v1.10. The v1.0 appellation suggests that this is the first feature complete release, not the first version!
It may be enlightened, but can it immanentize the eschaton?
Just thumbing through these, this framework looks a lot like GObject... Why are there literally 5 or 6 different frameworks in Linux, each with their own container classes, marshaling, runloop, event handling, and string libraries again? It'd make sense if they were all for different languages, used vastly different semantics, etc. and then only barely, but these all have bindings for dozens of languages and all gab with the client in essentially the same way. It's weird.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
In retrospect, I've got to admire the dedication and self-control demonstrated by the E developers.
Back when E17 was started, it was a bloated (if awesome) project. I got sick and tired of waiting for it to finish, and pretty much soured on it when they started changing things drastically, making components (like efm - the file manager component of E17 at the time) discontinued. Granted, that's partially to be expected, but it was in development for years at that time - and reasonably stable despite.
Flash forward to now: it's a very, very lightweight window manager (compared to many others, at least) with a fairly rich featureset. It's been used recently on the "ePC" (2 years ago?) and IIRC it's been used on phones. The libraries are featureful and there is quite a lot of functionality exposed in the interfaces for the size of everything. The windowing toolkits are fast, and the result on my screen is likewise fast (and smooth) - even without acceleration. The libraries themselves are basically like the fltk2 toolkit, in many ways - but significantly more 'polished'.
It may have taken 10 years to 'get right' (or close to it) but the end result is, frankly, quite impressive.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It's these version numbers that are confusing people. And everyone does these version numbers differently. So should we replace version numbers with dates? That would bring up other problems like should it be yyyy-mm-dd or mm-dd-yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy? Another way of doing this would be to have a feature complete indicator followed by a patch number. So you could have FC1.675. But others may want to use different structures or designators. We should all find a standard we can agree on mostly, and use that. But that can be like hurding cats.
If they want to promote a product that's essential to the UI of a desktop/handheld OS then why is their official site pretty much devoid of full-size images to give visitors a first impression?
It makes them easier to sort, otherwise you have to reverse the order and then sort.
For something like versioning it should certainly be yyyymmdd as that way if you have a directory full of enlightenment-yyyy-mm-dd.tar.bz2 name order == version order.
Nick
Is there a way to remove the comments from the Slashdot RSS feed? Takes up a lot of time scrolling past all of them to get to the next news item in Reader. The ads are fine just the comments are annoying!
Been using E since the late 90s ever since I saw it in Mastering Linux. Although getting E17 to work used to be a chore, I found it's much easier to install no a days. Got it running flawlessly on an i7, a Core2 Duo, and an ancient P2120 (Transmeta Crusoe @ 933MHz). The only thing I miss is Entrance (Login Manager) :(
Cheers to Raster and the E-Team!
Even way back before I'd defected to OS X, Enlightenment (0.16) was a visually amazing graphical environment - IMHO better in many ways than anything else out there, OS X included. From an end-user point of view, though, it was sometimes maddening the way they (well, probably mainly Raster) would plug along on 0.17 and these libraries, then decide to scrap everything and start pretty much from scratch on a different approach - that happened at least twice while I was a user, and I'd bet it's happened since I stopped really paying attention to the project. But it's great to see that they finally stuck to it and have brought the libraries to 1.0 - Enlightenment still has much to offer, and is still in some ways is still ahead of everything else. If I could drop it into place on my Mac and use it for everything - not just X11 apps - I'd probably still be running Enlightenment.
#DeleteChrome
Will the HURD finally be completed? Mass hysteria!
Where are the Debian packages? There were supposed to be an earth-shattering Debian package!
I am a former openmoko user. I developed openmoko apps using EFL as well. There is a lot of stuff missing from EFL. A lot of stuff which is not documented. There are many situations where you just have to try something and if it doesn't work, try something else. A good component set will have documentation telling you what components can be embedded in other components. In many cased with EFL you have to go to the code or write a test to find out. Interoperability between components seems to have been developed on an "as needed" basis. A lot of the error messages written to stdout are unprofessionally written and uninformative. Its easy to generate a crash. I just can't see this going anywhere.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Distro's set rules. But not all distros use the the same numbering scheme for versions. Then move outside a distro and role your own using source code and things can get very interesting. So, yes you are right within your distro, but many distros renumber and apply patches to the source before distribution as a package. So consistency within a distro is maintained, but as you noted there are exceptions. Stating "schema: major.minor.patch" is nice, but lacks definition. Define major, minor, and patch. "Patch" could be the distro patch or a patch from the project. Is 0 in major mean the software is alpha, beta, production? Does an even number in minor mean stable or unstable? How high are numbers allowed before you must increment your major version? Is version 3.898437658675.22 realistic? A better question is does it really convey any useful information, or cause confusion?
These libraries are wrong on so many levels. It seems the E developers have not learned anything from the last 10 years of software development.
The programming language used is old and good for serious applications. Let's face the truth: C is good for kernels and device drivers, but it stinks as a general-purpose programming language. Macros, the void* type, manual memory management, C strings, init functions, OOP in C, etc are all things that hinter serious application development.
Next you're going to tell me Duke Nukem Forever is coming out.
What's EFL? Why all these TLA's? I hate this crap...
Have you got any public comparisons to GTK or Qt regarding speed, flexibility and footprint? If not, what you say look pure advertisement. Not that surprising as EFL is your child and there's (still!) nearly no EFL community among application developers these days (please provide examples of non-trivial applications with at least average usability and consistency). Just please do not paste jokes like edite (http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/wiki/Editje) which is hard to compare even with GTK or Qt solutions from 2005, consistency/usability/feature -wise.
Regarding flexibility please paste some links on how C from 80's with void* used everywhere (evas objects, even without structural paradigm) is better flexibility than object-oriented solutions.
If you're looking for an enlighment distro i heartily suggest giving the latest macpup a spin!