Re: gnome-screensaver: Up for grabs?

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi;

On 21 July 2016 at 13:42, Ikey Doherty <michael i doherty intel com> wrote:
> So Jeremy Bicha kindly contacted me the other day to express concern
> with Budgie/GNOME Screensaver. I had been toying with the notion of
> forking GNOME Screensaver due to its deadness, and making it work
> better for Budgie/Modern GNOME integration.
>
> Jeremy correctly pointed out it might be worth maintaining the
> project instead, which I'm up for.

AFAIR, gnome-screensaver is part of the "Flashback" session:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeFlashback

given that it uses Metacity.

> So - assuming its up for grabs, I'd have a couple of things I'd
> like to do immediately to it:
>
>  - Enforce my own coding style (Sorry, I use .clang-format as part
> of my CI processes)

Changing the coding style is usually a good way to break the history
of a project, and `git blame` alongside with it. It usually is up to
the maintainer to decide the coding style, but for established
projects — even unmaintained ones — history is probably more relevant
than coding style.

>  - Run it via various static analysis tools as part of the cleanup

Don't see anything wrong with this.

>  - Enforce C99 (Ideally I'd like C11 but I don't know if GNOME will
> permit this? Would be an interesting discussion)

GNOME, as a project, does not mandate a C standard. There are some
projects that wish to still support compilers that do not wholly
support the C99 or C11 standards — like MSVC. Considering that
gnome-screensaver is an X11-only project that has no portability
outside of Linux and Unix-y OSes, it probably only needs to care about
GCC and Clang.

>  - Enhance theme-a-bility
>  - Permit RGBA on top level components (not wallpaper) and update the
>    UI style, to enable proper theming (I need this for Budgie
> integration). Essentially this would revert locking the UI to the old
> GNOME Shell styling

Styling via CSS is likely safer than loading C modules that may or may
not compromise the integrity of the locking screen. I'm not entirely
sure what "themability" means in this context, though.

> So with those points in mind, is it up for grabs, would you want me
> grabbing it, and are my points acceptable? :)

You probably want to talk to the maintainers of the Flashback session,
to ensure that you're not breaking their expectations; other than
that, gnome-screensaver is essentially not part of the GNOME session,
so it's entirely up to you to decide the direction of the project, if
you wish to own it.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
https://www.bassi.io
[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]